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Often in the analysis of first-order methods for both smooth and nonsmooth optimization, assuming the existence of a growth/error bound or KL condition facilitates much stronger convergence analysis. Hence separate analysis is typically…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-10 Benjamin Grimmer

High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

Minimax problems have achieved success in machine learning such as adversarial training, robust optimization, reinforcement learning. For theoretical analysis, current optimal excess risk bounds, which are composed by generalization error…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Bowei Zhu , Shaojie Li , Yong Liu

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

We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro , Blake Woodworth

In this paper, we first prove a high probability bound rather than an expectation bound for stochastic optimization with smooth loss. Furthermore, the existing analysis requires the knowledge of optimal classifier for tuning the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-12-03 Rong Jin

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajović , Dušan Jakovetić , Soummya Kar , Ali H. Sayed

We design an algorithm which finds an $\epsilon$-approximate stationary point (with $\|\nabla F(x)\|\le \epsilon$) using $O(\epsilon^{-3})$ stochastic gradient and Hessian-vector products, matching guarantees that were previously available…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-25 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We study the problem of differentially private stochastic convex optimization (DP-SCO) with heavy-tailed gradients, where we assume a $k^{\text{th}}$-moment bound on the Lipschitz constants of sample functions rather than a uniform bound.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Hilal Asi , Daogao Liu , Kevin Tian

Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-06 Haochuan Li , Jian Qian , Yi Tian , Alexander Rakhlin , Ali Jadbabaie

While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Peng Xu , Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Yassine Laguel , Necdet Serhat Aybat , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods. Smoothness is a restrictive assumption in machine learning in both theory and practice,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-27 Daniel Yiming Cao , August Y. Chen , Karthik Sridharan , Benjamin Tang

Gradient clipping is a popular modification to standard (stochastic) gradient descent, at every iteration limiting the gradient norm to a certain value $c >0$. It is widely used for example for stabilizing the training of deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anastasia Koloskova , Hadrien Hendrikx , Sebastian U. Stich

Prior work (Klochkov $\&$ Zhivotovskiy, 2021) establishes at most $O\left(\log (n)/n\right)$ excess risk bounds via algorithmic stability for strongly-convex learners with high probability. We show that under the similar common assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Bowei Zhu , Shaojie Li , Mingyang Yi , Yong Liu

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

We propose new continuous-time formulations for first-order stochastic optimization algorithms such as mini-batch gradient descent and variance-reduced methods. We exploit these continuous-time models, together with simple Lyapunov analysis…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-12 Antonio Orvieto , Aurelien Lucchi

We analyse the convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm for convex composite problems in the presence of gradient and proximal computational inaccuracies. We derive new tighter deterministic and probabilistic bounds that we use to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-07 Anis Hamadouche , Yun Wu , Andrew M. Wallace , Joao F. C. Mota

We consider the stochastic gradient method with random reshuffling ($\mathsf{RR}$) for tackling smooth nonconvex optimization problems. $\mathsf{RR}$ finds broad applications in practice, notably in training neural networks. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Hengxu Yu , Xiao Li

Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik