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arXiv · 2610.02738

Inner Momentum for Differentially Private Muon

Bishnu Bhusal·Minh Vu·Ben Southworth·Geigh Zollicoffer·Rohit Chadha·Manish Bhattarai
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Abstract

Differentially private training clips each per-example gradient before adding noise. This clipping is radial for each example, yet unequal clipping factors can distort the relative singular-vector geometry of their average. Muon is particularly exposed to this effect, since its update is an approximate polar factor UV^T that depends only on the singular vectors that clipping can shift. To curb this degradation, we propose averaging each sampled example's Muon gradient over the current model and a short history of recent models before clipping. The clipped batch matrix then separates into a common rescaling and a covariance residual R between sampled gradients and clipping values, with ||R||_F <= sigma_lambda sigma_G, bounding the clipping-induced distortion directly. We further show that a finite Newton-Schulz iteration preserves the polar factor of its input under these spectral conditions, confirming that our correction survives orthogonalization. In private GPT-2 fine-tuning on E2E and DART at epsilon in {1, 2, 4, 8}, DP-Muon-IM improves BLEU and ROUGE-L over DP-Muon in every seed-matched comparison, and non-private diagnostics show 2-4% lower pre-noise polar error.

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Bishnu Bhusal, Minh Vu, Ben Southworth, Geigh Zollicoffer, Rohit Chadha, Manish Bhattarai. 2026-10-02. Inner Momentum for Differentially Private Muon. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02738

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