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Related papers: The Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in SGD

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In this work, we study the convergence \emph{in high probability} of clipped gradient methods when the noise distribution has heavy tails, ie., with bounded $p$th moments, for some $1<p\le2$. Prior works in this setting follow the same…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-05 Ta Duy Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy L. Nguyen

Introducing noise in the training of machine learning systems is a powerful way to protect individual privacy via differential privacy guarantees, but comes at a cost to utility. This work looks at whether the inherent randomness of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Stephanie L. Hyland , Shruti Tople

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-23 Gerard Ben Arous , Reza Gheissari , Aukosh Jagannath

In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-26 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , Alexander Gasnikov

Several recent trends in machine learning theory and practice, from the design of state-of-the-art Gaussian Process to the convergence analysis of deep neural nets (DNNs) under stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have found it fruitful to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-04-07 Greg Yang

Training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with small batches using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) yields superior test performance compared to larger batches. The specific noise structure inherent to SGD is known to be responsible for this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Tom Sander , Maxime Sylvestre , Alain Durmus

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

We investigate the dynamical and convergent properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Characterizing the relation between learning rate, batch size and the properties of the final minima, such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-14 Stanisław Jastrzębski , Zachary Kenton , Devansh Arpit , Nicolas Ballas , Asja Fischer , Yoshua Bengio , Amos Storkey

Distributed optimization plays an important role in modern large-scale machine learning and data processing systems by optimizing the utilization of computational resources. One of the classical and popular approaches is Local Stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Andrey Sadchikov , Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Alexander Gasnikov

Gradient clipping is a widely used technique in Machine Learning and Deep Learning (DL), known for its effectiveness in mitigating the impact of heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in the training of large language models.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

We study the empirical version of halfspace depths with the objective of establishing a connection between the rates of convergence and the tail behaviour of the corresponding underlying distributions. The intricate interplay between the…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-06-03 Sibsankar Singha , Marie Kratz , Sreekar Vadlamani

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become a cornerstone of neural network optimization due to its computational efficiency and generalization capabilities. However, the gradient noise introduced by SGD is often assumed to be uncorrelated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Marcel Kühn , Bernd Rosenow

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Scott Pesme , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-07 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

Growing evidence suggests that synaptic weights in the brain follow heavy-tailed distributions, yet most theoretical analyses of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) assume Gaussian connectivity. We systematically study the activity of RNNs…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-27 Yi Xie , Stefan Mihalas , Łukasz Kuśmierz

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Chi Jin , Praneeth Netrapalli , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Michael I. Jordan

High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia