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Loss functions with non-isolated minima have emerged in several machine learning problems, creating a gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we formulate a new type of local convexity condition that is suitable to describe the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Taehee Ko , Xiantao Li

The stochastic gradient descent has been widely used for solving composite optimization problems in big data analyses. Many algorithms and convergence properties have been developed. The composite functions were convex primarily and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-03 Takayuki Kawashima , Hironori Fujisawa

We consider the minimization of non-convex quadratic forms regularized by a cubic term, which exhibit multiple saddle points and poor local minima. Nonetheless, we prove that, under mild assumptions, gradient descent approximates the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-31 Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi

We provide sharp path-dependent generalization and excess risk guarantees for the full-batch Gradient Descent (GD) algorithm on smooth losses (possibly non-Lipschitz, possibly nonconvex). At the heart of our analysis is an upper bound on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-13 Konstantinos E. Nikolakakis , Farzin Haddadpour , Amin Karbasi , Dionysios S. Kalogerias

We present a unified theorem for the convergence analysis of stochastic gradient algorithms for minimizing a smooth and convex loss plus a convex regularizer. We do this by extending the unified analysis of Gorbunov, Hanzely \& Richt\'arik…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ahmed Khaled , Othmane Sebbouh , Nicolas Loizou , Robert M. Gower , Peter Richtárik

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Zhenxun Zhuang , Ashok Cutkosky , Francesco Orabona

An usual problem in statistics consists in estimating the minimizer of a convex function. When we have to deal with large samples taking values in high dimensional spaces, stochastic gradient algorithms and their averaged versions are…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-01-12 Antoine Godichon-Baggioni

Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-15 Qi Deng , Chenghao Lan

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used optimization methods for parallel and distributed processing of large datasets. One of the key limitations of distributed SGD is the need to regularly communicate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-25 Xiaojian Xu , Ulugbek S. Kamilov

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-10-05 Arnulf Jentzen , Philippe von Wurstemberger

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants underpin modern machine learning by enabling efficient optimization of large-scale models. However, their local search nature limits exploration in complex landscapes. In this paper, we…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-07-22 Sirui Peng , Shengminjie Chen , Xiaoming Sun , Hongyi Zhou

We identify and analyze a fundamental limitation of the classical projected subgradient method in nonsmooth convex optimization: the inevitable failure caused by the absence of valid subgradients at boundary points. We show that, under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Zhihan Zhu , Yanhao Zhang , Yong Xia

The gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithm has been widely applied to solve minimax optimization problems. In order to achieve convergent policy parameters for minimax optimization, it is important that GDA generates convergent variable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-18 Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang

Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) has gained the attention of optimization researchers due to its global optimization properties. This paper proves an improved convergence property to local minimizers of nonconvex objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Zhishen Huang , Stephen Becker

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have established themselves as the go-to algorithms for large-scale machine learning problems with independent samples due to their generalization performance and intrinsic computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Hao Chen , Lili Zheng , Raed Al Kontar , Garvesh Raskutti

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Yixuan Qiu , Xiao Wang

Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Bohang Zhang , Jikai Jin , Cong Fang , Liwei Wang

Stochastic mirror descent (SMD) is a fairly new family of algorithms that has recently found a wide range of applications in optimization, machine learning, and control. It can be considered a generalization of the classical stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-04 Navid Azizan , Babak Hassibi