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We provide a detailed study on the implicit bias of gradient descent when optimizing loss functions with strictly monotone tails, such as the logistic loss, over separable datasets. We look at two basic questions: (a) what are the…

We study high-probability convergence in online learning, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy tails, a general framework of nonlinear SGD methods is considered, subsuming several popular nonlinearities like sign,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Aleksandar Armacki , Shuhua Yu , Pranay Sharma , Gauri Joshi , Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

Gradient temporal difference (Gradient TD) algorithms are a popular class of stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms used for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Here, we consider Gradient TD algorithms with an additional heavy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Rohan Deb , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Gradient descent or its variants are popular in training neural networks. However, in deep Q-learning with neural network approximation, a type of reinforcement learning, gradient descent (also known as Residual Gradient (RG)) is barely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Shuyu Yin , Tao Luo , Peilin Liu , Zhi-Qin John Xu

In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Bodu Gong , Gustavo Enrique Batista , Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux

State-of-the-art training algorithms for deep learning models are based on stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Recently, many variations have been explored: perturbing parameters for better accuracy (such as in Extragradient), limiting SGD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian U. Stich

Online learning algorithms require to often recompute least squares regression estimates of parameters. We study improving the computational complexity of such algorithms by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type schemes in place of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-11-21 Nathaniel Korda , Prashanth L. A. , Rémi Munos

Gradient clipping is a fundamental tool in Deep Learning, improving the high-probability convergence of stochastic first-order methods like SGD, AdaGrad, and Adam under heavy-tailed noise, which is common in training large language models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Saleh Vatan Khah , Savelii Chezhegov , Shahrokh Farahmand , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

We consider stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data with the guarantee of being differentially private (DP). Most prior works on differentially private stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data are either restricted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chenhan Jin , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , James Cheng , Tieyong Zeng

Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Anant Raj , Melih Barsbey , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli

This paper considers the decision-dependent optimization problem, where the data distributions react in response to decisions affecting both the objective function and linear constraints. We propose a new method termed repeated projected…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-13 Zifan Wang , Changxin Liu , Thomas Parisini , Michael M. Zavlanos , Karl H. Johansson

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

Heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise, commonly observed in transformer models, can destabilize the optimization process. Recent works mainly focus on developing and understanding approaches to address heavy-tailed noise in the centralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Junfei Sun , Dixi Yao , Xuchen Gong , Tahseen Rabbani , Manzil Zaheer , Tian Li

We study learning algorithms that seek to minimize the conditional value-at-risk (CVaR), when all the learner knows is that the losses incurred may be heavy-tailed. We begin by studying a general-purpose estimator of CVaR for potentially…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-04 Matthew J. Holland , El Mehdi Haress

With the vigorous development of artificial intelligence technology, various engineering technology applications have been implemented one after another. The gradient descent method plays an important role in solving various optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Jinhuan Duan , Xianxian Li , Shiqi Gao , Jinyan Wang , Zili Zhong

Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs) are widely used for building ranking and relevance models in search and recommendation. Considerations such as latency and interpretability dictate the use of as few features as possible to train…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-07 Cuize Han , Nikhil Rao , Daria Sorokina , Karthik Subbian

This paper introduces a robust and computationally efficient estimation framework for high-dimensional volatility models in the BEKK-ARCH class. The proposed approach employs data truncation to ensure robustness against heavy-tailed…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-05-26 Kejun Chen , Yuchang Lin , Qianqian Zhu

Gradient boosting algorithms construct a regression predictor using a linear combination of ``base learners''. Boosting also offers an approach to obtaining robust non-parametric regression estimators that are scalable to applications with…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-08-11 Xiaomeng Ju , Matías Salibián-Barrera

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a ubiquitous algorithm for a variety of machine learning problems. Researchers and industry have developed several techniques to optimize SGD's runtime performance, including asynchronous execution and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-06 Christopher De Sa , Ce Zhang , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

The effectiveness of supervised learning techniques has made them ubiquitous in research and practice. In high-dimensional settings, supervised learning commonly relies on dimensionality reduction to improve performance and identify the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-11 Chang Liu , Bo Li , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik , Alina Oprea