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The use of low-bit quantization has emerged as an indispensable technique for enabling the efficient training of large-scale models. Despite its widespread empirical success, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its impact on learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Dechen Zhang , Junwei Su , Difan Zou

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

Forward gradient descent (FGD) has been proposed as a biologically more plausible alternative of gradient descent as it can be computed without backward pass. Considering the linear model with $d$ parameters, previous work has found that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-27 Niklas Dexheimer , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

We develop and analyze a procedure for gradient-based optimization that we refer to as stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG). As a member of the SVRG family of algorithms, SCSG makes use of gradient estimates at two scales,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-17 Lihua Lei , Michael I. Jordan

Stochastic Gradient Descent or SGD is the most popular optimization algorithm for large-scale problems. SGD estimates the gradient by uniform sampling with sample size one. There have been several other works that suggest faster epoch-wise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-01 Beidi Chen , Yingchen Xu , Anshumali Shrivastava

The interplay between optimization and privacy has become a central theme in privacy-preserving machine learning. Noisy stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has emerged as a cornerstone algorithm, particularly in large-scale settings. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Shurong Lin , Eric D. Kolaczyk , Adam Smith , Elliot Paquette

We develop a probabilistic machine learning method, which formulates a class of stochastic neural networks by a stochastic optimal control problem. An efficient stochastic gradient descent algorithm is introduced under the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Richard Archibald , Feng Bao , Yanzhao Cao , He Zhang

A common pursuit in modern statistical learning is to attain satisfactory generalization out of the source data distribution (OOD). In theory, the challenge remains unsolved even under the canonical setting of covariate shift for the linear…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-02-14 Yuanshi Liu , Haihan Zhang , Qian Chen , Cong Fang

We study the generalization error of randomized learning algorithms -- focusing on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) -- using a novel combination of PAC-Bayes and algorithmic stability. Importantly, our generalization bounds hold for all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Ben London

Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Toki Tahmid Inan , Mingrui Liu , Amarda Shehu

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are the main workhorses for solving large-scale optimization problems with nonconvex objective functions. Although the convergence of SGDs in the (strongly) convex case is well-understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Aritra Dutta , El Houcine Bergou , Soumia Boucherouite , Nicklas Werge , Melih Kandemir , Xin Li

Inverse problems in scientific computing often require optimization over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. A commonly used solver in such settings is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where gradients are approximated using randomly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Sandra Cerrai , Qin Li , Anjali Nair , Jaeyoung Yoon

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) still is the workhorse for many practical problems. However, it converges slow, and can be difficult to tune. It is possible to precondition SGD to accelerate its convergence remarkably. But many attempts…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-23 Xi-Lin Li

The learning rate is perhaps the single most important parameter in the training of neural networks and, more broadly, in stochastic (nonconvex) optimization. Accordingly, there are numerous effective, but poorly understood, techniques for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-16 Bin Shi , Weijie J. Su , Michael I. Jordan

Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) and its variants have shown promising successes in approximate inference for complex distributions. In practice, we notice that the kernel used in SVGD-based methods has a decisive effect on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-29 Qingzhong Ai , Shiyu Liu , Lirong He , Zenglin Xu

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Liu Ziyin , Botao Li , James B. Simon , Masahito Ueda

There is widespread sentiment that it is not possible to effectively utilize fast gradient methods (e.g. Nesterov's acceleration, conjugate gradient, heavy ball) for the purposes of stochastic optimization due to their instability and error…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-02 Prateek Jain , Sham M. Kakade , Rahul Kidambi , Praneeth Netrapalli , Aaron Sidford