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In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

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

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is attractive from a speed perspective because workers do not wait for synchronization. However, the Transformer model converges poorly with asynchronous SGD, resulting in substantially lower…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Alham Fikri Aji , Kenneth Heafield

The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Frederik Kunstner , Jacques Chen , Jonathan Wilder Lavington , Mark Schmidt

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Xufeng Cai , Cheuk Yin Lin , Jelena Diakonikolas

Modern machine learning often requires training with large batch size, distributed data, and massively parallel compute hardware (like mobile and other edge devices or distributed data centers). Communication becomes a major bottleneck in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Ahmed Khaled , Satyen Kale , Arthur Douillard , Chi Jin , Rob Fergus , Manzil Zaheer

In overparametrized models, the noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) implicitly regularizes the optimization trajectory and determines which local minimum SGD converges to. Motivated by empirical studies that demonstrate that training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Alex Damian , Tengyu Ma , Jason D. Lee

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-14 Kangqiao Liu , Liu Ziyin , Masahito Ueda

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

Understanding the implicit bias of training algorithms is of crucial importance in order to explain the success of overparametrised neural networks. In this paper, we study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent over diagonal linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Scott Pesme , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

This paper presents a new generalization error analysis for Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) based on algorithmic stability. The obtained results overhaul a series of recent works that suggested an increased instability due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Batiste Le Bars , Aurélien Bellet , Marc Tommasi , Kevin Scaman , Giovanni Neglia

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum is widely used for training modern deep learning architectures. While it is well-understood that using momentum can lead to faster convergence rate in various settings, it has also been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Samy Jelassi , Yuanzhi Li

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-04 Xiaowu Dai , Yuhua Zhu

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

The noise in stochastic gradient descent (SGD), caused by minibatch sampling, is poorly understood despite its practical importance in deep learning. This work presents the first systematic study of the SGD noise and fluctuations close to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-09 Liu Ziyin , Kangqiao Liu , Takashi Mori , Masahito Ueda

Grokking -- the delayed transition from memorization to generalization in small algorithmic tasks -- remains poorly understood. We present a geometric analysis of optimization dynamics in transformers trained on modular arithmetic. PCA of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yongzhong Xu

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Deep neural networks with remarkably strong generalization performances are usually over-parameterized. Despite explicit regularization strategies are used for practitioners to avoid over-fitting, the impacts are often small. Some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Deren Lei , Zichen Sun , Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang