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Convergence Analysis of the Last Iterate in Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum

Optimization and Control 2025-05-19 v1

Abstract

Distributed stochastic gradient methods are widely used to preserve data privacy and ensure scalability in large-scale learning tasks. While existing theory on distributed momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (mSGD) mainly focuses on time-averaged convergence, the more practical last-iterate convergence remains underexplored. In this work, we analyze the last-iterate convergence behavior of distributed mSGD in non-convex settings under the classical Robbins-Monro step-size schedule. We prove both almost sure convergence and L2L_2 convergence of the last iterate, and derive convergence rates. We further show that momentum can accelerate early-stage convergence, and provide experiments to support our theory.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.10889,
  title  = {Convergence Analysis of the Last Iterate in Distributed Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum},
  author = {Difei Cheng and Ruinan Jin and Hong Qiao and Bo Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.10889},
  year   = {2025}
}

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16 pages