English

Last Iterate Convergence of AdaGrad-Norm for Convex Non-Smooth Optimization

Optimization and Control 2026-04-14 v1

Abstract

We study the convergence of the last iterate (i.e., the (N+1)(N+1)-th iterate) of the AdaGrad method. Although AdaGrad -- an adaptive subgradient method -- underpins a wide class of algorithms, most existing convergence analyses focus on averaged (or best) iterates. We derive worst-case upper bounds on the suboptimality of the final point and show that, with an optimally tuned stepsize parameter, the last iterate converges at the rate O(1/N1/4)O(1/N^{1/4}). We complement this guarantee with matching lower-bound constructions, proving that this rate is tight and that AdaGrad's last-iterate rate is strictly worse than the classical O(1/N1/2)O(1/N^{1/2}) rate for its averaged iterate. Technically, our analysis introduces an exponent parameter that captures the growth of the cumulative squared subgradients; combined with the last-iterate inequality of Zamani and Glineur (2025), this reduces the problem to bounding a particular series.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.10728,
  title  = {Last Iterate Convergence of AdaGrad-Norm for Convex Non-Smooth Optimization},
  author = {Margarita Preobrazhenskaia and Makar Sidorov and Igor Preobrazhenskii and Eduard Gorbunov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.10728},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

19 pages, 2 figures