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Related papers: Better Theory for SGD in the Nonconvex World

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In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-15 Zhize Li , Peter Richtárik

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Tuo Liu , El Mehdi Saad , Wojciech Kotłowski , Francesco Orabona

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

We study the complexity of finding the global solution to stochastic nonconvex optimization when the objective function satisfies global Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) inequality and the queries from stochastic gradient oracles satisfy mild…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-05 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Jalal Etesami , Niao He , Negar Kiyavash

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the workhorse of large-scale learning, yet classical analyses rely on assumptions that can be either too strong (bounded variance) or too coarse (uniform noise). The expected smoothness (ES) condition…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Yuta Kawamoto , Hideaki Iiduka

Uniform stability is a notion of algorithmic stability that bounds the worst case change in the model output by the algorithm when a single data point in the dataset is replaced. An influential work of Hardt et al. (2016) provides strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Raef Bassily , Vitaly Feldman , Cristóbal Guzmán , Kunal Talwar

Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Chi Jin , Praneeth Netrapalli , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Michael I. Jordan

We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…

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

We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Tomer Koren , Roi Livni , Yishay Mansour , Uri Sherman

The article discusses distributed gradient-descent algorithms for computing local and global minima in nonconvex optimization. For local optimization, we focus on distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD)--a simple network-based…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-17 Brian Swenson , Soummya Kar , H. Vincent Poor , José M. F. Moura , Aaron Jaech

Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Kang Chen , Yasong Feng , Tianyu Wang

The Stochastic Gradient Descent method (SGD) and its stochastic variants have become methods of choice for solving finite-sum optimization problems arising from machine learning and data science thanks to their ability to handle large-scale…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-06 Trang H. Tran , Quoc Tran-Dinh , Lam M. Nguyen

In this paper, we study decentralized online stochastic non-convex optimization over a network of nodes. Integrating a technique called gradient tracking in decentralized stochastic gradient descent, we show that the resulting algorithm,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-21 Ran Xin , Usman A. Khan , Soummya Kar

Stochastic gradient optimization methods are broadly used to minimize non-convex smooth objective functions, for instance when training deep neural networks. However, theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic behaviour of these methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Jean-Baptiste Fest , Audrey Repetti , Emilie Chouzenoux

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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

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 study nonconvex finite-sum problems and analyze stochastic variance reduced gradient (SVRG) methods for them. SVRG and related methods have recently surged into prominence for convex optimization given their edge over stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-04-06 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

We establish a data-dependent notion of algorithmic stability for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and employ it to develop novel generalization bounds. This is in contrast to previous distribution-free algorithmic stability results for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Ilja Kuzborskij , Christoph H. Lampert