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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

Asynchronous stochastic gradient methods are central to scalable distributed optimization, particularly when devices differ in computational capabilities. Such settings arise naturally in federated learning, where training takes place on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-20 Artavazd Maranjyan , Peter Richtárik

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 adaptive aggregation for heterogeneous local SGD in convex finite-sum optimization, allowing heterogeneous local horizons, minibatch sizes, gradient noise, and participation. We introduce HEW-Local SGD, a corrected local-SGD method…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-29 Dmitry Pasechnyuk-Vilensky , Martin Takáč

In distributed training of machine learning models, gradient descent with local iterative steps, commonly known as Local (Stochastic) Gradient Descent (Local-(S)GD) or Federated averaging (FedAvg), is a very popular method to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Heng Zhu , Harsh Vardhan , Arya Mazumdar

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

In this paper, we propose a simple variant of the original SVRG, called variance reduced stochastic gradient descent (VR-SGD). Unlike the choices of snapshot and starting points in SVRG and its proximal variant, Prox-SVRG, the two vectors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-31 Fanhua Shang , Kaiwen Zhou , Hongying Liu , James Cheng , Ivor W. Tsang , Lijun Zhang , Dacheng Tao , Licheng Jiao

There is an increased interest in building data analytics frameworks with advanced algebraic capabilities both in industry and academia. Many of these frameworks, e.g., TensorFlow and BIDMach, implement their compute-intensive primitives in…

Databases · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Yujing Ma , Florin Rusu , Martin Torres

Minimax optimal convergence rates for classes of stochastic convex optimization problems are well characterized, where the majority of results utilize iterate averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying step sizes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Rahul Kidambi , Praneeth Netrapalli

This paper presents fault-tolerant asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithms. SGD is widely used for approximating the minimum of a cost function $Q$, as a core part of optimization and learning algorithms. Our algorithms…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Hagit Attiya , Noa Schiller

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are the main workhorses for solving large-scale optimization problems with nonconvex objective functions. Although the convergence of SGDs in the (strongly) convex case is well-understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Aritra Dutta , El Houcine Bergou , Soumia Boucherouite , Nicklas Werge , Melih Kandemir , Xin Li

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy

We investigate the problem of minimizing the expectation of smooth nonconvex functions in a distributed setting with multiple parallel workers that are able to compute stochastic gradients. A significant challenge in this context is the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-16 Artavazd Maranjyan , Omar Shaikh Omar , Peter Richtárik

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

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

We propose a general framework for distributed stochastic optimization under delayed gradient models. In this setting, $n$ local agents leverage their own data and computation to assist a central server in minimizing a global objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-04 Xinran Zheng , Tara Javidi , Behrouz Touri

Optimization objectives in the form of a sum of intractable expectations are rising in importance (e.g., diffusion models, variational autoencoders, and many more), a setting also known as "finite sum with infinite data." For these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-13 Kyurae Kim , Joohwan Ko , Yi-An Ma , Jacob R. Gardner