Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithms

Overview & Synopsis

Adversarial sharpness penalty per iteration of a base optimizer, known as sharpness-aware minimization (SAM), is an accepted technique to improve generalization in deep learning. Recently, Muon has emerged as a dominant optimization algorithm for training large language models (LLMs). It achieves lower sample complexity for heavy-tailed gradient updates - a phenomenon common in LLM training. However, sharpness penalties with Muon updates are yet largely unexplored in the literature. Moreover, the behavior of SAM under heavy-tailed noise is unknown both theoretically and empirically. A potential reason for this gap is the additional cost of extra gradient computation per iteration for penalty perturbations in SAM, which becomes prohibitive for LLMs. This paper introduces Sharpness-aware Orthogonalized Momentum Algorithm (SOMA) to combine a computationally efficient and theoretically grounded perturbation scheme with the Muon algorithm. The key idea is to use stale (purely) stochastic gradient noise for adversarial perturbations. Theoretically, we show that SOMA's sample complexity is invariant to the perturbation direction. We provide explorations and insights into SOMA's robustness to heavy-tailed gradient noise. We extensively explore SOMA's efficacy in (a) mitigating quality degradation due to post-training quantization, and (b) catastrophic forgetting during fine-tuning of LLMs.