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Gradient clipping is a popular modification to standard (stochastic) gradient descent, at every iteration limiting the gradient norm to a certain value $c >0$. It is widely used for example for stabilizing the training of deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anastasia Koloskova , Hadrien Hendrikx , Sebastian U. Stich

We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Benjamin Dubois-Taine , Reza Babanezhad

Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) are predominant approaches for solving stochastic optimization. On smooth nonconvex problems, a few acceleration techniques have been applied to improve the convergence rate of SGMs. However, little…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-24 Yangyang Xu , Yibo Xu , Yonggui Yan , Jie Chen

Classical machine learning models such as deep neural networks are usually trained by using Stochastic Gradient Descent-based (SGD) algorithms. The classical SGD can be interpreted as a discretization of the stochastic gradient flow. In…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-10-03 Valentin Leplat , Daniil Merkulov , Aleksandr Katrutsa , Daniel Bershatsky , Olga Tsymboi , Ivan Oseledets

Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Bohang Zhang , Jikai Jin , Cong Fang , Liwei Wang

We study stochastic convex optimization with heavy-tailed data under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). Most prior work on this problem is restricted to the case where the loss function is Lipschitz. Instead, as introduced by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Gautam Kamath , Xingtu Liu , Huanyu Zhang

High-probability guarantees in stochastic optimization are often obtained only under strong noise assumptions such as sub-Gaussian tails. We show that such guarantees can also be achieved under the weaker assumption of bounded variance by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Jiaming Liang

We introduce a new approach to develop stochastic optimization algorithms for a class of stochastic composite and possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The main idea is to combine two stochastic estimators to create a new hybrid one. We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-05-05 Quoc Tran-Dinh , Nhan H. Pham , Dzung T. Phan , Lam M. Nguyen

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 propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Naeimeh Omidvar , Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali , Hamed Mahdavi

We study Stochastic Gradient Descent with AdaGrad stepsizes: a popular adaptive (self-tuning) method for first-order stochastic optimization. Despite being well studied, existing analyses of this method suffer from various shortcomings:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Amit Attia , Tomer Koren

Distributed optimization has become the default training paradigm in modern machine learning due to the growing scale of models and datasets. To mitigate communication overhead, local updates are often applied before global aggregation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Su Hyeong Lee , Manzil Zaheer , Tian Li

We study nonlinearly preconditioned gradient methods for smooth nonconvex optimization problems, focusing on sigmoid preconditioners that inherently perform a form of gradient clipping akin to the widely used gradient clipping technique.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Konstantinos Oikonomidis , Jan Quan , Panagiotis Patrinos

Recent theoretical studies have shown that heavy-tails can emerge in stochastic optimization due to `multiplicative noise', even under surprisingly simple settings, such as linear regression with Gaussian data. While these studies have…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu , Umut Simsekli , Kun Yuan , Lingjiong Zhu

We propose a stochastic conditional gradient method (CGM) for minimizing convex finite-sum objectives formed as a sum of smooth and non-smooth terms. Existing CGM variants for this template either suffer from slow convergence rates, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-19 Gideon Dresdner , Maria-Luiza Vladarean , Gunnar Rätsch , Francesco Locatello , Volkan Cevher , Alp Yurtsever

Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-16 Alberto Bietti , Julien Mairal

Stochastic-gradient-based optimization has been a core enabling methodology in applications to large-scale problems in machine learning and related areas. Despite the progress, the gap between theory and practice remains significant, with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-01-01 Lihua Lei , Michael I. Jordan

Regularization is essential for avoiding over-fitting to training data in network optimization, leading to better generalization of the trained networks. The label noise provides a strong implicit regularization by replacing the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-04 Kensuke Nakamura , Bong-Soo Sohn , Kyoung-Jae Won , Byung-Woo Hong

We study distributed stochastic gradient (D-SG) method and its accelerated variant (D-ASG) for solving decentralized strongly convex stochastic optimization problems where the objective function is distributed over several computational…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-05 Alireza Fallah , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Asuman Ozdaglar , Umut Simsekli , Lingjiong Zhu

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