Efficient Distributed Orthonormal Optimizers for Large-Scale Training

Speaker: Kwangjun Ahn, Microsoft Research I delivered a 50-minute technical talk on recent advances in orthonormal update methods for large-scale AI model training. This topic has been rapidly gaining attention in the community, emerging as a strong successor to AdamW following the success of orthonormal optimizers in training production-scale models such as Kimi-K2 and GLM-4.5. The talk centered on the design and practice of orthonormal updates, with a focus on optimizers such as Muon and Dion2. While I briefly discussed their theoretical foundations, the emphasis was on practical usage: how to integrate these optimizers into modern training pipelines, interpret their algorithmic components, and leverage the implementation guidelines provided in our open-source codebase at https://github.com/microsoft/dion