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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

It is well-known that the reparameterisation gradient estimator, which exhibits low variance in practice, is biased for non-differentiable models. This may compromise correctness of gradient-based optimisation methods such as stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Dominik Wagner , Basim Khajwal , C. -H. Luke Ong

Classical statistical learning theory predicts that overparameterized models should exhibit severe overfitting, yet modern deep neural networks with far more parameters than training samples consistently generalize well. This contradiction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Zeran Johannsen

We develop a stochastic differential equation, called homogenized SGD, for analyzing the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a high-dimensional random least squares problem with $\ell^2$-regularization. We show that homogenized…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-05-17 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-11 Christopher De Sa , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

A major challenge in understanding the generalization of deep learning is to explain why (stochastic) gradient descent can exploit the network architecture to find solutions that have good generalization performance when using high capacity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-12 Yifan Wu , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

We propose a new stochastic optimization framework for empirical risk minimization problems such as those that arise in machine learning. The traditional approaches, such as (mini-batch) stochastic gradient descent (SGD), utilize an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-04 Kenji Kawaguchi , Haihao Lu

We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-31 Bin Hu , Peter Seiler , Laurent Lessard

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) based methods have been widely used for training large-scale machine learning models that also generalize well in practice. Several explanations have been offered for this generalization performance, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-11 Yikai Zhang , Wenjia Zhang , Sammy Bald , Vamsi Pingali , Chao Chen , Mayank Goswami

Despite an extensive body of literature on deep learning optimization, our current understanding of what makes an optimization algorithm effective is fragmented. In particular, we do not understand well whether enhanced optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Toki Tahmid Inan , Mingrui Liu , Amarda Shehu

Deep neural networks achieve stellar generalisation on a variety of problems, despite often being large enough to easily fit all their training data. Here we study the generalisation dynamics of two-layer neural networks in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-21 Sebastian Goldt , Madhu S. Advani , Andrew M. Saxe , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, yet their generalization theory typically relies on independent sampling assumptions. In many practical applications, data are generated by Markov chains and learning is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jiahuan Wang , Ziqing Wen , Ping Luo , Dongsheng Li , Tao Sun

Grokking is the phenomenon whereby, unlike the training performance, which peaks early in the training process, the test/generalization performance of a model stagnates over arbitrarily many epochs and then suddenly jumps to usually close…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Ali Saheb Pasand , Elvis Dohmatob

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

Stochastic gradient descent is one of the most successful approaches for solving large-scale problems, especially in machine learning and statistics. At each iteration, it employs an unbiased estimator of the full gradient computed from one…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2018-12-05 Bangti Jin , Xiliang Lu

We study a distributed consensus-based stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and show that the rate of convergence involves the spectral properties of two matrices: the standard spectral gap of a weight matrix from the network…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-09-02 Avleen S. Bijral , Anand D. Sarwate , Nathan Srebro

Stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Shen-Yi Zhao , Chang-Wei Shi , Yin-Peng Xie , Wu-Jun Li

The momentum acceleration technique is widely adopted in many optimization algorithms. However, there is no theoretical answer on how the momentum affects the generalization performance of the optimization algorithms. This paper studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-30 Bohan Wang , Qi Meng , Huishuai Zhang , Ruoyu Sun , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Many problems require to optimize empirical risk functions over large data sets. Gradient descent methods that calculate the full gradient in every descent step do not scale to such datasets. Various flavours of Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Francesco Cosentino , Harald Oberhauser , Alessandro Abate

While nowadays most gradient-based optimization methods focus on exploring the high-dimensional geometric features, the random error accumulated in a stochastic version of any algorithm implementation has not been stressed yet. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Tong Yang , Long Sha , Pengyu Hong