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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is an estimation tool for large data employed in machine learning and statistics. Due to the Markovian nature of the SGD process, inference is a challenging problem. An underlying asymptotic normality of…

Computation · Statistics 2025-03-27 Rahul Singh , Abhinek Shukla , Dootika Vats

We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Maksym Andriushchenko , Aditya Varre , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

The noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD), caused by minibatch sampling, is poorly understood despite its practical importance in deep learning. This work presents the first systematic study of the SGD noise and fluctuations close to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Liu Ziyin , Kangqiao Liu , Takashi Mori , Masahito Ueda

In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Feng Chen , Daniel Kunin , Atsushi Yamamura , Surya Ganguli

The gradient noise of SGD is considered to play a central role in the observed strong generalization abilities of deep learning. While past studies confirm that the magnitude and the covariance structure of gradient noise are critical for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Jingfeng Wu , Wenqing Hu , Haoyi Xiong , Jun Huan , Vladimir Braverman , Zhanxing Zhu

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu

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) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

We interpret the variational inference of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) as minimizing a new potential function named the \textit{quasi-potential}. We analytically construct the quasi-potential function in the case when the loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Wenqing Hu , Zhanxing Zhu , Haoyi Xiong , Jun Huan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the workhorse algorithm of deep learning technology. At each step of the training phase, a mini batch of samples is drawn from the training dataset and the weights of the neural network are adjusted…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2022-09-07 Francesca Mignacco , Pierfrancesco Urbani

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-02 Xi Chen , Jason D. Lee , Xin T. Tong , Yichen Zhang

In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Nam H. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Jayant R. Kalagnanam , Katya Scheinberg

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

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 descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Navid Azizan , Babak Hassibi

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-14 Kangqiao Liu , Liu Ziyin , Masahito Ueda

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) forms the core optimization method for deep neural networks. While some theoretical progress has been made, it still remains unclear why SGD leads the learning dynamics in overparameterized networks to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Mingwei Wei , David J Schwab

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun