Convergence guarantees for Muon: New parameter regimes and generalizations

In this paper, we establish the first asymptotic convergence guarantees for the Muon algorithm through a more accurate proxy for the Newton-Schultz iteration than the typical matrix sign function. We prove that, for appropriate choices of hyperparameters, the iterates satisfy limk→∞|nabla f(xk)|=0, and, under a global Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition, that the sequence of function values converges linearly. The key insight is that the regularization, implicit in Muon's Newton-Schulz implementation, induces a bounded preconditioner, exposing Muon as a preconditioned Polyak heavy-ball method and enabling a classical Lyapunov analysis. This observation naturally motivates applying the same preconditioning structure to the Nesterov gradient evaluation. We formalize this idea by introducing Muesterov, a Nesterov-based variant of Muon, and prove that it enjoys the same convergence guarantees, extending the theoretical framework beyond the heavy-ball setting. Numerical experiments on a scalar cross-entropy problem corroborate the theory and illuminate the joint role of the learning rate and the Newton-Schulz regularizer in controlling convergence. Preliminary numerical simulations training the nanoGPT dataset provide intuition regarding the relevance of the observations in this paper to practical applications.