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Training a neural network with the gradient descent algorithm gives rise to a discrete-time nonlinear dynamical system. Consequently, behaviors that are typically observed in these systems emerge during training, such as convergence to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-10 Kamil Nar , S. Shankar Sastry

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yury Demidovich , Grigory Malinovsky , Igor Sokolov , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic optimization lies at the heart of machine learning, and its cornerstone is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a method introduced over 60 years ago. The last 8 years have seen an exciting new development: variance reduction (VR)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-05 Robert M. Gower , Mark Schmidt , Francis Bach , Peter Richtarik

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

We systematically analyze optimization dynamics in deep neural networks (DNNs) trained with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study the effect of learning rate $\eta$, depth $d$, and width $w$ of the neural network. By analyzing the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-25 Dayal Singh Kalra , Maissam Barkeshli

The dynamical stability of optimization methods at the vicinity of minima of the loss has recently attracted significant attention. For gradient descent (GD), stable convergence is possible only to minima that are sufficiently flat w.r.t.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Rotem Mulayoff , Tomer Michaeli

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a workhorse in machine learning, yet its slow convergence can be a computational bottleneck. Variance reduction techniques such as SAG, SVRG and SAGA have been proposed to overcome this weakness,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-29 Thomas Hofmann , Aurelien Lucchi , Simon Lacoste-Julien , Brian McWilliams

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

Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and machine learning, this paper considers the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the gradients of the underlying objective function are sampled from Markov processes.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Thinh T. Doan , Lam M. Nguyen , Nhan H. Pham , Justin Romberg

We study the problem of training a two-layer neural network (NN) of arbitrary width using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) where the input $\boldsymbol{x}\in \mathbb{R}^d$ is Gaussian and the target $y \in \mathbb{R}$ follows a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-17 Alireza Mousavi-Hosseini , Sejun Park , Manuela Girotti , Ioannis Mitliagkas , Murat A. Erdogdu

Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Alexandru Meterez , Depen Morwani , Costin-Andrei Oncescu , Jingfeng Wu , Cengiz Pehlevan , Sham Kakade

We study the impact of the batch size $n_b$ on the iteration time $T$ of training two-layer neural networks with one-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on multi-index target functions of isotropic covariates. We characterize the optimal…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-06 Luca Arnaboldi , Yatin Dandi , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro , Luca Pesce , Ludovic Stephan

The convergence behavior of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is highly sensitive to the batch size and learning rate settings. Recent theoretical studies have identified the existence of a critical batch size that minimizes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Hikaru Umeda , Hideaki Iiduka

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Tomer Koren , Roi Livni , Yishay Mansour , Uri Sherman

In deep learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its momentum-based variants are widely used for optimization. However, the internal dynamics of these methods remain underexplored. In this paper, we analyze gradient behavior through…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Zhipeng Yao , Rui Yu , Guisong Chang , Ying Li , Yu Zhang , Dazhou Li

This paper presents a comprehensive study on the convergence rates of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm when applied to overparameterized two-layer neural networks. Our approach combines the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-07-11 Dinghao Cao , Zheng-Chu Guo , Lei Shi

With the rise of big data analytics, multi-layer neural networks have surfaced as one of the most powerful machine learning methods. However, their theoretical mathematical properties are still not fully understood. Training a neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Victor Luo , Yazhen Wang , Glenn Fung

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

Lipschitz continuity characterizes the worst-case sensitivity of neural networks to small input perturbations; yet its dynamics (i.e. temporal evolution) during training remains under-explored. We present a rigorous mathematical framework…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Róisín Luo , James McDermott , Christian Gagné , Qiang Sun , Colm O'Riordan