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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

In this paper, we investigate a general class of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms, called Conditioned SGD, based on a preconditioning of the gradient direction. Using a discrete-time approach with martingale tools, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-17 Rémi Leluc , François Portier

Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Sacchit Kale , Piyushi Manupriya , Pierre Marion , Francis Bach , Anant Raj

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Boao Kong , Hengrui Zhang , Kun Yuan

We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-10 Rong Ge , Furong Huang , Chi Jin , Yang Yuan

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the method of choice in many machine learning tasks thanks to its scalability and efficiency in dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on the shuffling version of SGD which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Trang H. Tran

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Sobihan Surendran , Antoine Godichon-Baggioni , Adeline Fermanian , Sylvain Le Corff

Following the same routine as [SSJ20], we continue to present the theoretical analysis for stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGD with momentum) in this paper. Differently, for SGD with momentum, we demonstrate it is the two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Bin Shi

Recent work has established an empirically successful framework for adapting learning rates for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). This effectively removes all needs for tuning, while automatically reducing learning rates over time on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-03-28 Tom Schaul , Yann LeCun

While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Peng Xu , Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Benjamin Dubois-Taine , Reza Babanezhad

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Xi He , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Martin Takáč

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

This article examines the implicit regularization effect of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We consider the case of SGD without replacement, the variant typically used to optimize large-scale neural networks. We analyze this algorithm in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Pierfrancesco Beneventano

A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-22 Kfir Y. Levy

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

Recent empirical work on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to over-parameterized deep learning has shown that most gradient components over epochs are quite small. Inspired by such observations, we rigorously study properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Yingxue Zhou , Xinyan Li , Arindam Banerjee

We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Amit Attia , Tomer Koren

Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (MSGD) algorithm has been widely applied to many nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, e.g., training deep neural networks, variational Bayesian inference, and etc. Despite its empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Tianyi Liu , Zhehui Chen , Enlu Zhou , Tuo Zhao

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ning Yang , Yikuan Zhang , Qi Ouyang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu