Disentangle Muon’s contribution from auxiliary techniques in reported improvements

Quantify the extent to which reported performance improvements in prior studies are attributable specifically to the Muon optimizer, rather than to concurrent auxiliary techniques such as QK-Norm or QK-Clip.

Background

The authors observe that empirical studies of Muon often include additional methods such as QK-Norm or QK-Clip, complicating attribution of gains. They emphasize the need for controlled comparisons to isolate Muon’s effect on optimization stability and performance from these confounding techniques.

References

Consequently, it remains unclear to what extent the reported improvements can be attributed to Muon itself, how Muon relates to established adaptive optimizers such as Adam, and whether Muon can be systematically improved.

— Delving into Muon and Beyond: Deep Analysis and Extensions  (2602.04669 - Qi et al., 4 Feb 2026) in Section 1 (Introduction)