Enhancing LLM Training via Spectral Clipping

Abstract

While spectral-based optimizers like Muon operate directly on the spectrum of updates, standard adaptive methods such as AdamW do not account for the spectral structure of weights and gradients, leaving them vulnerable to two empirical issues in large language model (LLM) training: (i) the optimizer updates can have large spectral norms, potentially destabilizing training and degrading generalization; (ii) stochastic gradient noise can exhibit sparse spectral spikes, with a few dominant singular values much larger than the rest. We propose SPECTRA, a general framework addressing these by (i) post-spectral clipping of updates to enforce spectral-norm constraints (ii) optional pre-spectral clipping of gradients to suppress spectral noise spikes. We prove that post-clipping constitutes a Composite Frank-Wolfe method with spectral-norm constraints and weight regularization. We further analyze how pre-clipping mitigates sparse spectral spikes. We propose efficient soft spectral clipping via Newton-Schulz iterations, avoiding expensive SVD. Experiments on LLM pretraining show SPECTRA uniformly improves validation loss for various optimizers, including AdamW, Signum, Mars, and AdEMAMix, with the best-performing variants achieving state-of-the-art results. Models trained with SPECTRA exhibit smaller weight norms, confirming the link between spectral clipping and regularization.