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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is of fundamental importance in deep learning. Despite its simplicity, elucidating its efficacy remains challenging. Conventionally, the success of SGD is ascribed to the stochastic gradient noise (SGN)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Chengli Tan , Jiangshe Zhang , Junmin Liu

It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-05 Zhe Jiao , Martin Keller-Ressel

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the context of deep neural networks has raised lots of concerns recently. Along this line, we study a general form of gradient based optimization dynamics with unbiased…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-11 Zhanxing Zhu , Jingfeng Wu , Bing Yu , Lei Wu , Jinwen Ma

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajović , Dušan Jakovetić , Soummya Kar , Ali H. Sayed

We consider a first order stochastic optimization framework where, at each iteration, $K$ independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) data point samples are drawn, based on which stochastic gradients can be queried. We allow gradient noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Manojlo Vukovic , Dusan Jakovetic

Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shuhua Yu , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is commonly modeled as a Langevin process, assuming that minibatch noise acts as Brownian motion. However, this approximation relies on a continuous-time limit and a sqrt(eta) noise scaling that does not…

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

In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Bodu Gong , Gustavo Enrique Batista , Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux

In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-02 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang

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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Ruinan Jin , Difei Cheng , Hong Qiao , Xin Shi , Shaodong Liu , Bo Zhang

The injection of heavy-tailed noise into the iterates of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has garnered growing interest in recent years due to its theoretical and empirical benefits for optimization and generalization. However, its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-13 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Sinan Yıldırım , Lingjiong Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-17 Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto

Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-25 Soon Hoe Lim , Yijun Wan , Umut Şimşekli

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

We study the dynamics of a continuous-time model of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for the least-square problem. Indeed, pursuing the work of Li et al. (2019), we analyze Stochastic Differential Equations (SDEs) that model SGD either…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Adrien Schertzer , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien

Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has attracted considerable recent attention due to its potential for scaling computational resources, reducing training time, and helping protect user privacy in machine learning. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Siyuan Yu , Wei Chen , H. Vincent Poor