English

Stochastic Trust-Region Methods for Over-parameterized Models

Optimization and Control 2026-04-16 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

Under interpolation-type assumptions such as the strong growth condition, stochastic optimization methods can attain convergence rates comparable to full-batch methods, but their performance, particularly for SGD, remains highly sensitive to step-size selection. To address this issue, we propose a unified stochastic trust-region framework that eliminates manual step-size tuning and extends naturally to equality-constrained problems. For unconstrained optimization, we develop a first-order stochastic trust-region algorithm and show that, under the strong growth condition, it achieves an iteration and stochastic first-order oracle complexity of O(ε2log(1/ε))O(\varepsilon^{-2} \log(1/\varepsilon)) for finding an ε\varepsilon-stationary point. For equality-constrained problems, we introduce a quadratic-penalty-based stochastic trust-region method with penalty parameter μ\mu, and establish an iteration and oracle complexity of O(ε4log(1/ε))O(\varepsilon^{-4} \log(1/\varepsilon)) to reach an ε\varepsilon-stationary point of the penalized problem, corresponding to an O(ε)O(\varepsilon)-approximate KKT point of the original constrained problem. Numerical experiments on deep neural network training and orthogonally constrained subspace fitting demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve performance comparable to well-tuned stochastic baselines, while exhibiting stable optimization behavior and effectively handling hard constraints without manual learning-rate scheduling.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.14017,
  title  = {Stochastic Trust-Region Methods for Over-parameterized Models},
  author = {Aike Yang and Hao Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.14017},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

26 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:11:00.369Z