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Related papers: Better Theory for SGD in the Nonconvex World

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In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Nam H. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Jayant R. Kalagnanam , Katya Scheinberg

This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Most results on Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the convex and smooth setting are presented under the form of bounds on the ergodic function value gap. It is an open question whether bounds can be derived directly on the last iterate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-21 Guillaume Garrigos , Daniel Cortild , Lucas Ketels , Juan Peypouquet

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-11 Christopher De Sa , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

In this paper, we investigate the theoretical properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for statistical inference in the context of nonconvex optimization problems, which have been relatively unexplored compared to convex settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-06 Yanjie Zhong , Todd Kuffner , Soumendra Lahiri

Multiview representation learning is very popular for latent factor analysis. It naturally arises in many data analysis, machine learning, and information retrieval applications to model dependent structures among multiple data sources. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Zhehui Chen , Lin F. Yang , Chris J. Li , Tuo Zhao

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Zhenxun Zhuang , Ashok Cutkosky , Francesco Orabona

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the local behavior of gradient descent and stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Sebastian Kassing , Thomas Kruse

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Haihan Zhang , Yuanshi Liu , Qianwen Chen , Cong Fang

Recent studies have shown that many nonconvex machine learning problems satisfy a generalized-smooth condition that extends beyond traditional smooth nonconvex optimization. However, the existing algorithms are not fully adapted to such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-03 Yufeng Yang , Erin Tripp , Yifan Sun , Shaofeng Zou , Yi Zhou

We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Sashank J. Reddi , Suvrit Sra , Barnabas Poczos , Alex Smola

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-29 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Xufeng Cai , Cheuk Yin Lin , Jelena Diakonikolas

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Zhize Li

The stochastic gradient descent method with momentum (SGDM) is a common approach for solving large-scale and stochastic optimization problems. Despite its popularity, the convergence behavior of SGDM remains less understood in nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-30 Junwen Qiu , Bohao Ma , Andre Milzarek

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Xiaoyu Li

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-22 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nadav Hallak , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher