OptMuon: Closed-Loop Orthogonalized Momentum Methods for Stochastic Optimization with Zero-Noise Optimality

Abstract

Orthogonalized momentum updates, as used in Muon-style optimizers, have recently shown strong empirical stability in large-scale deep learning. However, existing orthogonalized methods are typically paired with constant or open-loop magnitude rules, and therefore do not explicitly calibrate their update magnitudes from the observed optimization trajectory. Motivated by the closed-loop perspective behind Lipschitz-free and noise-adaptive methods, we propose OptMuon, a family of adaptive momentum orthogonalization methods for stochastic nonconvex optimization. OptMuon combines Muon-style polar-factor directions with a trajectory-dependent AdaGrad-Norm-type coefficient schedule, so that the update magnitude is determined by the observed gradient and momentum history rather than by a prescribed Lipschitz-dependent rule. The schedule does not use the smoothness constant, the variance level, or the bounded-gradient constant in parameter selection, and its running-maximum correction prevents isolated gradient spikes from causing excessive coefficient collapse. Under lower-boundedness, unbiased stochastic gradients with bounded variance, smoothness, and an almost-sure bounded stochastic-gradient condition, we prove two complementary guarantees. OptMuon-A achieves the noise-adaptive rate \(\tilde{\mathcal O}(T^{-1/2}+σ^{1/2}T^{-1/4})\) under average smoothness, while OptMuon-I achieves \(\tilde{\mathcal O}(T^{-1/2}+σ^{1/3}T^{-1/3})\) under individual smoothness. In the zero-noise regime, both bounds automatically reduce to a nearly optimal deterministic first-order rate \(\tilde{\mathcal O}(T^{-1/2})\) without manual hyperparameter retuning. These results show that closed-loop scalar adaptation can be combined with Muon-style momentum orthogonalization while retaining noise adaptivity and zero-noise optimality up to logarithmic factors.