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Stochastic approximation (SA) is a fundamental iterative framework with broad applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Classical analyses typically rely on martingale difference or Markov noise with bounded second moments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siddharth Chandak , Anuj Yadav , Ayfer Ozgur , Nicholas Bambos

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is fundamental for training deep neural networks, especially in non-convex settings. Understanding SGD's generalization properties is crucial for ensuring robust model performance on unseen data. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Wenjun Xiong , Juan Ding , Xinlei Zuo , Qizhai Li

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-12 Chao Sun , Huiming Zhang , Bo Chen , Li Yu

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

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 this paper, we introduce proximal gradient temporal difference learning, which provides a principled way of designing and analyzing true stochastic gradient temporal difference learning algorithms. We show how gradient TD (GTD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Bo Liu , Ian Gemp , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh , Ji Liu , Sridhar Mahadevan , Marek Petrik

Minimizing empirical risk subject to a set of constraints can be a useful strategy for learning restricted classes of functions, such as monotonic functions, submodular functions, classifiers that guarantee a certain class label for some…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-26 Andrew Cotter , Maya Gupta , Jan Pfeifer

The success of SGD in deep learning has been ascribed by prior works to the implicit bias induced by finite batch sizes ("SGD noise"). While prior works focused on offline learning (i.e., multiple-epoch training), we study the impact of SGD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Nikhil Vyas , Depen Morwani , Rosie Zhao , Gal Kaplun , Sham Kakade , Boaz Barak

In distributed training of deep neural networks, people usually run Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) or its variants on each machine and communicate with other machines periodically. However, SGD might converge slowly in training some deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Mingrui Liu , Zhenxun Zhuang , Yunwei Lei , Chunyang Liao

In this work, we theoretically investigate the generalization properties of neural networks (NN) trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm with large learning rates. Under such a training regime, our finding is that, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Miao Lu , Beining Wu , Xiaodong Yang , Difan Zou

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

Cyclic and randomized stepsizes are widely used in the deep learning practice and can often outperform standard stepsize choices such as constant stepsize in SGD. Despite their empirical success, not much is currently known about when and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-08-30 Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu , Umut Şimşekli , Lingjiong Zhu

Learning in deep neural networks (DNNs) is implemented through minimizing a highly non-convex loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method. This learning process can effectively find good wide minima without being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Guozhang Chen , Cheng Kevin Qu , Pulin Gong

In this work we study high probability bounds for stochastic subgradient methods under heavy tailed noise. In this setting the noise is only assumed to have finite variance as opposed to a sub-Gaussian distribution for which it is known…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-16 Daniela A. Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Xingyi Yang

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 present novel empirical observations regarding how stochastic gradient descent (SGD) navigates the loss landscape of over-parametrized deep neural networks (DNNs). These observations expose the qualitatively different roles of learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-31 Chen Xing , Devansh Arpit , Christos Tsirigotis , Yoshua Bengio

Recent results in the literature suggest that the penultimate (second-to-last) layer representations of neural networks that are trained for classification exhibit a clustering property called neural collapse (NC). We study the implicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-29 Tomer Galanti , Liane Galanti , Ido Ben-Shaul

Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , David Dobre , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Gauthier Gidel

By ensuring differential privacy in the learning algorithms, one can rigorously mitigate the risk of large models memorizing sensitive training data. In this paper, we study two algorithms for this purpose, i.e., DP-SGD and DP-NSGD, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Xiaodong Yang , Huishuai Zhang , Wei Chen , Tie-Yan Liu