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Related papers: Convergence of Gradient Descent on Separable Data

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High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

We consider stochastic gradient descent and its averaging variant for binary classification problems in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space. In the traditional analysis using a consistency property of loss functions, it is known that the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-26 Atsushi Nitanda , Taiji Suzuki

Solving large tensor linear systems poses significant challenges due to the high volume of data stored, and it only becomes more challenging when some of the data is missing. Recently, Ma et al. showed that this problem can be tackled using…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Anna Ma , Deanna Needell , Alexander Xue

This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Benjamin Grimmer

The typical training of neural networks using large stepsize gradient descent (GD) under the logistic loss often involves two distinct phases, where the empirical risk oscillates in the first phase but decreases monotonically in the second…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-28 Yuhang Cai , Jingfeng Wu , Song Mei , Michael Lindsey , Peter L. Bartlett

We establish conditions under which gradient descent applied to fixed-width deep networks drives the logistic loss to zero, and prove bounds on the rate of convergence. Our analysis applies for smoothed approximations to the ReLU, such as…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-02 Niladri S. Chatterji , Philip M. Long , Peter L. Bartlett

One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Simon S. Du , Xiyu Zhai , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

Recently, several studies have proven the global convergence and generalization abilities of the gradient descent method for two-layer ReLU networks. Most studies especially focused on the regression problems with the squared loss function,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-19 Atsushi Nitanda , Geoffrey Chinot , Taiji Suzuki

Adaptive optimization methods (such as Adam) play a major role in LLM pretraining, significantly outperforming Gradient Descent (GD). Recent studies have proposed new smoothness assumptions on the loss function to explain the advantages of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Robin Yadav , Shuo Xie , Tianhao Wang , Zhiyuan Li

We focus on the classification problem with a separable dataset, one of the most important and classical problems from machine learning. The standard approach to this task is logistic regression with gradient descent (LR+GD). Recent studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-12 Alexander Tyurin

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

In this work, we investigate the margin-maximization bias exhibited by gradient-based algorithms in classifying linearly separable data. We present an in-depth analysis of the specific properties of the velocity field associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Mingze Wang , Zeping Min , Lei Wu

We present and analyze a momentum-based gradient method for training linear classifiers with an exponentially-tailed loss (e.g., the exponential or logistic loss), which maximizes the classification margin on separable data at a rate of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Ziwei Ji , Nathan Srebro , Matus Telgarsky

We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guy Smorodinsky , Sveta Gimpleson , Itay Safran

Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Hongjian Wang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

We provide tight finite-time convergence bounds for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent on quadratic functions, when the gradients are delayed and reflect iterates from $\tau$ rounds ago. First, we show that without stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-28 Yossi Arjevani , Ohad Shamir , Nathan Srebro

Transformer models have emerged as fundamental tools across various scientific and engineering disciplines, owing to their outstanding performance in diverse applications. Despite this empirical success, the theoretical foundations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Zhen Qin , Jinxin Zhou , Jiachen Jiang , Zhihui Zhu

We analyze the properties of gradient descent on convex surrogates for the zero-one loss for the agnostic learning of linear halfspaces. If $\mathsf{OPT}$ is the best classification error achieved by a halfspace, by appealing to the notion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Spencer Frei , Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

The gradient descent (GD) method -- is a fundamental and likely the most popular optimization algorithm in machine learning (ML), with a history traced back to a paper in 1847 (Cauchy, 1847). It was studied under various assumptions,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-20 Aleksandr Lobanov , Alexander Gasnikov , Eduard Gorbunov , Martin Takáč

In deep learning, it is common to use more network parameters than training points. In such scenarioof over-parameterization, there are usually multiple networks that achieve zero training error so that thetraining algorithm induces an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 Hung-Hsu Chou , Carsten Gieshoff , Johannes Maly , Holger Rauhut