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Asynchronous distributed stochastic gradient descent methods have trouble converging because of stale gradients. A gradient update sent to a parameter server by a client is stale if the parameters used to calculate that gradient have since…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-01-18 Augustus Odena

The increasing scale of data propels the popularity of leveraging parallelism to speed up the optimization. Minibatch stochastic gradient descent (minibatch SGD) and local SGD are two popular methods for parallel optimization. The existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yunwen Lei , Tao Sun , Mingrui Liu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for optimization in large-scale machine learning problems. Langford et al. (2009) introduce a sparse online learning method to induce sparsity via truncated gradient. With high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-10 Yuting Ma , Tian Zheng

Minimizing empirical risk subject to a set of constraints can be a useful strategy for learning restricted classes of functions, such as monotonic functions, submodular functions, classifiers that guarantee a certain class label for some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-26 Andrew Cotter , Maya Gupta , Jan Pfeifer

We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Idan Amir , Tomer Koren , Roi Livni

We perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Preetum Nakkiran , Gal Kaplun , Dimitris Kalimeris , Tristan Yang , Benjamin L. Edelman , Fred Zhang , Boaz Barak

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

The problem of stopping stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an online manner, based solely on the observed trajectory, is a challenging theoretical problem with significant consequences for applications. While SGD is routinely monitored as…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-24 Liviu Aolaritei , Michael I. Jordan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Sharan Sahu , Cameron J. Hogan , Martin T. Wells

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

A framework is introduced for solving a sequence of slowly changing optimization problems, including those arising in regression and classification applications, using optimization algorithms such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD). The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-09-25 Craig Wilson , Venugopal V. Veeravalli

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

Over the last decades, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been intensively studied by the Machine Learning community. Despite its versatility and excellent performance, the optimization of large models via SGD still is a time-consuming…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mauro DL Tosi , Martin Theobald

In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Ziming Zhang , Wenju Xu , Alan Sullivan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yury Demidovich , Grigory Malinovsky , Igor Sokolov , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been shown to generalize well in many deep learning applications. In practice, one often runs SGD with a geometrically decaying stepsize, i.e., a constant initial stepsize followed by multiple geometric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

SGD (Stochastic Gradient Descent) is a popular algorithm for large scale optimization problems due to its low iterative cost. However, SGD can not achieve linear convergence rate as FGD (Full Gradient Descent) because of the inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-05 Aixiang Chen , Bingchuan Chen , Xiaolong Chai , Rui Bian , Hengguang Li

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Xufeng Cai , Cheuk Yin Lin , Jelena Diakonikolas

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-29 Thomas Hofmann , Aurelien Lucchi , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Brian McWilliams