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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is being used routinely for optimizing non-convex functions. Yet, the standard convergence theory for SGD in the smooth non-convex setting gives a slow sublinear convergence to a stationary point. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-23 Robert M. Gower , Othmane Sebbouh , Nicolas Loizou

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the performance of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm by incorporating a modified decay step size based on $\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}}$. The proposed step size integrates a logarithmic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 M. Soheil Shamaee , S. Fathi Hafshejani

This paper revisits the Polyak step size schedule for convex optimization problems, proving that a simple variant of it simultaneously attains near optimal convergence rates for the gradient descent algorithm, for all ranges of strong…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-03 Elad Hazan , Sham Kakade

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

We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Xiaoyu Wang , Ya-xiang Yuan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is very useful in optimization problems with high-dimensional non-convex target functions, and hence constitutes an important component of several Machine Learning and Data Analytics methods. Recently there…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-11-11 Karl Bäckström , Marina Papatriantafilou , Philippas Tsigas

Gradient descent and its variants are de facto standard algorithms for training machine learning models. As gradient descent is sensitive to its hyperparameters, we need to tune the hyperparameters carefully using a grid search. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Yuki Takezawa , Han Bao , Ryoma Sato , Kenta Niwa , Makoto Yamada

Stochastic gradient methods with momentum are widely used in applications and at the core of optimization subroutines in many popular machine learning libraries. However, their sample complexities have not been obtained for problems beyond…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-12 Vien V. Mai , Mikael Johansson

Stochastic gradient descent is a canonical tool for addressing stochastic optimization problems, and forms the bedrock of modern machine learning and statistics. In this work, we seek to balance the fact that attenuating step-size is…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-07-10 Zhan Gao , Alec Koppel , Alejandro Ribeiro

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Aaron Mishkin , Ahmed Khaled , Yuanhao Wang , Aaron Defazio , Robert M. Gower

We present a theoretical analysis of stochastic optimization methods in terms of their sensitivity with respect to the step size. We identify a key quantity that, for each method, describes how the performance degrades as the step size…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Fabian Schaipp , Robert M. Gower , Adrien Taylor

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-13 Baptiste Goujaud , Adrien Taylor , Aymeric Dieuleveut

We propose and study Sparse Polyak, a variant of Polyak's adaptive step size, designed to solve high-dimensional statistical estimation problems where the problem dimension is allowed to grow much faster than the sample size. In such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-16 Tianqi Qiao , Marie Maros

Adaptive gradient methods are typically used for training over-parameterized models. To better understand their behaviour, we study a simplistic setting -- smooth, convex losses with models over-parameterized enough to interpolate the data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-22 Sharan Vaswani , Issam Laradji , Frederik Kunstner , Si Yi Meng , Mark Schmidt , Simon Lacoste-Julien

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Amartya Mukherjee , Jun Liu

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

We propose an algorithm for the adaptation of the learning rate for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that avoids the need for validation set use. The idea for the adaptiveness comes from the technique of extrapolation: to get an estimate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-28 Antti Koskela , Antti Honkela