English
Related papers

Related papers: The Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in SGD

200 papers

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

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

Deep neural networks achieve stellar generalisation even when they have enough parameters to easily fit all their training data. We study this phenomenon by analysing the dynamics and the performance of over-parameterised two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Sebastian Goldt , Madhu S. Advani , Andrew M. Saxe , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Modern deep networks are trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) whose key hyperparameters are the number of data considered at each step or batch size $B$, and the step size or learning rate $\eta$. For small $B$ and large $\eta$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Antonio Sclocchi , Matthieu Wyart

The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

Concentration inequalities form an essential toolkit in the study of high dimensional (HD) statistical methods. Most of the relevant statistics literature in this regard is based on sub-Gaussian or sub-exponential tail assumptions. In this…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-01-09 Arun Kumar Kuchibhotla , Abhishek Chakrabortty

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

Deep neural networks with remarkably strong generalization performances are usually over-parameterized. Despite explicit regularization strategies are used for practitioners to avoid over-fitting, the impacts are often small. Some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Deren Lei , Zichen Sun , Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

Recent work has highlighted a surprising alignment between gradients and the top eigenspace of the Hessian -- termed the Dominant subspace -- during neural network training. Concurrently, there has been growing interest in the distinct…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Daniyar Zakarin , Sidak Pal Singh

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ning Yang , Yikuan Zhang , Qi Ouyang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu

Extreme events and the heavy tail distributions driven by them are ubiquitous in various scientific, engineering and financial research. They are typically associated with stochastic instability caused by hidden unresolved processes.…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-05-22 Andrew J. Majda , Xin T. Tong

We characterise the learning of a mixture of two clouds of data points with generic centroids via empirical risk minimisation in the high dimensional regime, under the assumptions of generic convex loss and convex regularisation. Each cloud…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-19 Urte Adomaityte , Gabriele Sicuro , Pierpaolo Vivo

Stochastic approximation (SA) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms are work-horses for modern machine learning algorithms. Their constant stepsize variants are preferred in practice due to fast convergence behavior. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Zaiwei Chen , Shancong Mou , Siva Theja Maguluri

Deep linear networks (DLNs) are used as an analytically tractable model of the training dynamics of deep neural networks. While gradient descent in DLNs is known to exhibit saddle-to-saddle dynamics, the impact of stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Guillaume Corlouer , Avi Semler , Alexander Strang , Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

Recent empirical work on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to over-parameterized deep learning has shown that most gradient components over epochs are quite small. Inspired by such observations, we rigorously study properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Yingxue Zhou , Xinyan Li , Arindam Banerjee

Unraveling the reasons behind the remarkable success and exceptional generalization capabilities of deep neural networks presents a formidable challenge. Recent insights from random matrix theory, specifically those concerning the spectral…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-10 Xuanzhe Xiao , Zeng Li , Chuanlong Xie , Fengwei Zhou

In this paper, the problem of distributed optimization is studied via a network of agents. Each agent only has access to a noisy gradient of its own objective function, and can communicate with its neighbors via a network. To handle this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-19 Yuchen Yang , Kaihong Lu , Long Wang

We show that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escapes from sharp minima exponentially fast even before SGD reaches stationary distribution. SGD has been a de-facto standard training algorithm for various machine learning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Hikaru Ibayashi , Masaaki Imaizumi

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 study the convergence of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for training $L$-hidden-layer linear residual networks (ResNets). We prove that for training deep residual networks with certain linear transformations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Difan Zou , Philip M. Long , Quanquan Gu