When Does Muon Actually Win? A Paired Data-, Time-, and Tuning-Budget Benchmark

Mushir Akhtar; Hazem N. Nounou; Majdi Mansouri; Mohamed N. Nounou

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arXiv · 2610.21555

When Does Muon Actually Win? A Paired Data-, Time-, and Tuning-Budget Benchmark

Mushir Akhtar·Hazem N. Nounou·Majdi Mansouri·Mohamed N. Nounou

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Abstract

Muon's gains in data efficiency motivate evaluating its performance under explicit data, time, and tuning budgets. On a single A100 GPU, we compare a reference single-device Muon implementation with AdamW across 17.7M- and 33.6M-parameter causal language models and 2.70M-parameter vision transformers. A common 23-candidate development budget selects configurations evaluated with five matched seeds, full validation trajectories, optimizer-step timing, and a frozen one-shot test. Muon reduces validation-loss area under the curve by 3.25--22.44\% at equal data and lowers test loss in all 20 primary pairs. In this configuration, Muon improves time-normalized loss area} by 19.68--22.31\% on vision, while AdamW is better by 3.38--6.96\% on language. The full Muon optimizer call, including auxiliary AdamW updates, consumes 56.1--69.6\% of training time, compared with 6.1--9.1\% for the AdamW baseline. Muon also has higher expected regret under restricted access to these candidate pools. These results characterize small models with reference kernels; their wall-clock ordering does not establish a ranking for larger models or optimized implementations.

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Mushir Akhtar, Hazem N. Nounou, Majdi Mansouri, Mohamed N. Nounou. 2026-10-15. When Does Muon Actually Win? A Paired Data-, Time-, and Tuning-Budget Benchmark. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21555

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