Training-Loss Guarantees for Muon with Finite-Step Newton--Schulz Orthogonalization

Amartya Roy, Souvik Chakraborty

Existing convergence analyses of Muon either assume exact orthogonalization or analyze classical Newton--Schulz polynomials, and guarantee only stationarity, so it is unresolved what Muon's five tuned Newton--Schulz steps preserve and whether that suffices to reach a prescribed neural-network training loss. We establish a finite-time training guarantee that accounts for both momentum accumulation before orthogonalization and the tuned finite-step update. For full-batch training of a sufficiently wide two-layer ReLU network with fixed random output weights and a positive-definite limiting neural tangent kernel, we prove that Muon reaches any target empirical squared loss $\varepsilon>0$ with high probability over initialization. For every momentum parameter $μ\in[0,1)$, a target-dependent constant learning rate proportional to $(1-μ)\sqrt{\varepsilon}$ yields a hitting-time bound of $O((1-μ)^{-1}\varepsilon^{-1/2})$, with other problem parameters fixed. The sufficient width is independent of both target accuracy and momentum. The analysis shows that the tuned Newton--Schulz map preserves alignment with the momentum buffer while bounding the update's spectral norm. Control of…