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Related papers: Better Theory for SGD in the Nonconvex World

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Although stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants (e.g., stochastic momentum methods, AdaGrad) are the choice of algorithms for solving non-convex problems (especially deep learning), there still remain big gaps between the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-07 Zaiyi Chen , Zhuoning Yuan , Jinfeng Yi , Bowen Zhou , Enhong Chen , Tianbao Yang

We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Björn Engquist , Kui Ren , Yunan Yang

We prove novel convergence results for a stochastic proximal gradient algorithm suitable for solving a large class of convex optimization problems, where a convex objective function is given by the sum of a smooth and a possibly non-smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-08-11 Lorenzo Rosasco , Silvia Villa , Bang Công Vũ

We study the classical optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x)$ and analyze the gradient descent (GD) method in both nonconvex and convex settings. It is well-known that, under the $L$-smoothness assumption ($\|\nabla^2 f(x)\|…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-30 Alexander Tyurin

We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Andrea Schioppa

In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

Loss functions with non-isolated minima have emerged in several machine learning problems, creating a gap between theory and practice. In this paper, we formulate a new type of local convexity condition that is suitable to describe the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Taehee Ko , Xiantao Li

Adaptive optimizers can reduce to normalized steepest descent (NSD) when only adapting to the current gradient, suggesting a close connection between the two algorithmic families. A key distinction between their analyses, however, lies in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Shuo Xie , Tianhao Wang , Beining Wu , Zhiyuan Li

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

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan

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

In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Waïss Azizian , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Yikai Zhang , Wenjia Zhang , Sammy Bald , Vamsi Pingali , Chao Chen , Mayank Goswami

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) enables scalable distributed training but suffers from gradient staleness. Existing mitigation strategies, such as delay-adaptive learning rates and staleness-aware filtering, typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tehila Dahan , Roie Reshef , Sharon Goldstein , Kfir Y. Levy

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for strongly convex functions converges at the rate $\bO(1/k)$. However, achieving good results in practice requires tuning the parameters (for example the learning rate) of the algorithm. In this paper we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-15 Adam M. Oberman , Mariana Prazeres

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

We consider stochastic approximation for the least squares regression problem in the non-strongly convex setting. We present the first practical algorithm that achieves the optimal prediction error rates in terms of dependence on the noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-04 Aditya Varre , Nicolas Flammarion

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with mini-batching is a standard tool in large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical properties under heavy-tailed gradient noise remain largely unexplored. In this paper we study SGD with increasing…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Bartosz Glowacki , Rafal Kulik , Philippe Soulier

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Melinda Hagedorn , Florian Jarre

As one of the most fundamental stochastic optimization algorithms, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been intensively developed and extensively applied in machine learning in the past decade. There have been some modified SGD-type…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-28 Ruinan Jin , Yu Xing , Xingkang He