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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Mitchell Scott , Tianshi Xu , Ziyuan Tang , Alexandra Pichette-Emmons , Qiang Ye , Yousef Saad , Yuanzhe Xi

Randomized coordinate descent (RCD) is a popular optimization algorithm with wide applications in solving various machine learning problems, which motivates a lot of theoretical analysis on its convergence behavior. As a comparison, there…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-18 Puyu Wang , Liang Wu , Yunwen Lei

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely adopted iterative method for optimizing differentiable objective functions. In this paper, we propose and discuss a novel approach to scale up SGD in applications involving non-convex functions…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-07 Saad Mohamad , Hamad Alamri , Abdelhamid Bouchachia

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a workhorse algorithm for solving large-scale optimization problems in data science and machine learning. Understanding the convergence of SGD is hence of fundamental importance. In this work we examine…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-12-11 Lehan Chen , Yuji Nakatsukasa

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-07 Brian Swenson , Ryan Murray , H. Vincent Poor , Soummya Kar

Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

In this paper, we investigate the impact of stochasticity and large stepsizes on the implicit regularisation of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) over diagonal linear networks. We prove the convergence of GD and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-26 Mathieu Even , Scott Pesme , Suriya Gunasekar , Nicolas Flammarion

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its Ruppert-Polyak averaged variant (ASGD) lie at the heart of modern large-scale learning, yet their theoretical properties in high-dimensional settings are rarely understood. In this paper, we provide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Jiaqi Li , Zhipeng Lou , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber , Wei Biao Wu

We consider the distributed learning problem with data dispersed across multiple workers under the orchestration of a central server. Asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been widely explored in such a setting to reduce the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-28 Xiaolu Wang , Yuchang Sun , Hoi-To Wai , Jun Zhang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the most popular algorithm for training deep neural networks (DNNs). As larger networks and datasets cause longer training times, training on distributed systems is common and distributed SGD variants,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Kwangmin Yu , Thomas Flynn , Shinjae Yoo , Nicholas D'Imperio

Distributed optimization plays an important role in modern large-scale machine learning and data processing systems by optimizing the utilization of computational resources. One of the classical and popular approaches is Local Stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Andrey Sadchikov , Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Alexander Gasnikov

This paper theoretically reanalyzes the convergence of the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a structured minimization problem involving a finite-sum function with its gradient being stochastically approximated, and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Runze Li , Jintao Xu , Wenxun Xing

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-04 Kenji Kawaguchi , Haihao Lu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. Researchers and industry have developed several techniques to optimize SGD's runtime performance, including asynchronous execution and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-06 Christopher De Sa , Ce Zhang , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-11 Vien V. Mai , Mikael Johansson

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a popular parallel optimization algorithm in machine learning. Most theoretical analysis on ASGD take a discrete view and prove upper bounds for their convergence rates. However, the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-09 Li He , Qi Meng , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Raef Bassily , Vitaly Feldman , Cristóbal Guzmán , Kunal Talwar

Several works have aimed to explain why overparameterized neural networks generalize well when trained by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The consensus explanation that has emerged credits the randomized nature of SGD for the bias of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Shengchao Liu , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Dimitris Achlioptas

We revisit the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for solving convex optimization problems that serve as highly popular convex relaxations for many important low-rank matrix recovery problems such as \textit{matrix completion},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Dan Garber