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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Natanael Alpay , Emeric Battaglia

We develop a new algorithm for non-convex stochastic optimization that finds an $\epsilon$-critical point in the optimal $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector product computations. Our algorithm uses Hessian-vector…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Hoang Tran , Ashok Cutkosky

In the past several years, the last-iterate convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm has triggered people's interest due to its good performance in practice but lack of theoretical understanding. For Lipschitz convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zijian Liu , Zhengyuan Zhou

In this paper, we study the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method for the nonconvex nonsmooth optimization, and propose an accelerated SGD method by combining the variance reduction technique with Nesterov's extrapolation technique.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-18 Feihu Huang , Songcan Chen

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-07-28 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Sharan Sahu , Cameron J. Hogan , Martin T. Wells

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 this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-02 Kfir Y. Levy , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

When using stochastic gradient descent to solve large-scale machine learning problems, a common practice of data processing is to shuffle the training data, partition the data across multiple machines if needed, and then perform several…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-02 Qi Meng , Wei Chen , Yue Wang , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

This paper proposes a family of online second order methods for possibly non-convex stochastic optimizations based on the theory of preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (PSGD), which can be regarded as an enhance stochastic Newton…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-01 Xi-Lin Li

In this work we consider the stochastic minimization of nonsmooth convex loss functions, a central problem in machine learning. We propose a novel algorithm called Accelerated Nonsmooth Stochastic Gradient Descent (ANSGD), which exploits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-10-02 Hua Ouyang , Alexander Gray

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with Polyak's stepsize has recently gained renewed attention in stochastic optimization. Recently, Orvieto, Lacoste-Julien, and Loizou introduced a decreasing variant of Polyak's stepsize, where convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-01 Heinz H. Bauschke , Tran Thanh Tung

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. The current mathematical theory in the lens of regularization theory predicts that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-10 Bangti Jin , Zehui Zhou , Jun Zou

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Vivak Patel

In machine learning and neural network optimization, algorithms like incremental gradient, and shuffle SGD are popular due to minimizing the number of cache misses and good practical convergence behavior. However, their optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Anastasia Koloskova , Nikita Doikov , Sebastian U. Stich , Martin Jaggi

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jun-Kun Wang , Chi-Heng Lin , Jacob Abernethy

We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta , Francesco Orabona

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-30 Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

This paper theoretically reanalyzes the convergence of the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a structured minimization problem involving a finite-sum function with its gradient being stochastically approximated, and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Runze Li , Jintao Xu , Wenxun Xing

Due to the non-smoothness of optimization problems in Machine Learning, generalized smoothness assumptions have been gaining a lot of attention in recent years. One of the most popular assumptions of this type is $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-30 Eduard Gorbunov , Nazarii Tupitsa , Sayantan Choudhury , Alen Aliev , Peter Richtárik , Samuel Horváth , Martin Takáč