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In this paper, we study numerical approximations for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) that use adaptive step sizes. In particular, we consider a general setting where decisions to reduce step sizes are allowed to depend on the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-10 James Foster , Andraž Jelinčič

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Aaron Mishkin , Ahmed Khaled , Yuanhao Wang , Aaron Defazio , Robert M. Gower

Stochastic minimax optimization on Riemannian manifolds has recently attracted significant attention due to its broad range of applications, such as robust training of neural networks and robust maximum likelihood estimation. Existing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-11 Hongye Wang , Chang He , Bo Jiang

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

Many machine learning applications and tasks rely on the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variants. Effective step length selection is crucial for the success of these algorithms, which has motivated the development of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-18 Shigeng Sun , Yuchen Xie

Vanilla gradient methods are often highly sensitive to the choice of stepsize, which typically requires manual tuning. Adaptive methods alleviate this issue and have therefore become widely used. Among them, AdaGrad has been particularly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-16 Matia Bojovic , Saverio Salzo , Massimiliano Pontil

Schedule-Free SGD, proposed in [Defazio et al., 2024], achieves optimal convergence rates without requiring the training horizon in advance, by replacing learning rate schedules with a principled form of iterate averaging. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dimitris Oikonomou , Matthew Buchholz , Yuen-Man Pun , Robert M. Gower , Nicolas Loizou

The choice of step-size used in Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) optimization is empirically selected in most training procedures. Moreover, the use of scheduled learning techniques such as Step-Decaying, Cyclical-Learning, and Warmup to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Mahdi S. Hosseini , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

We consider a generic convex-concave saddle point problem with separable structure, a form that covers a wide-ranged machine learning applications. Under this problem structure, we follow the framework of primal-dual updates for saddle…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-06-15 Zhanxing Zhu , Amos J. Storkey

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a powerful optimization technique that is particularly useful in online learning scenarios. Its convergence analysis is relatively well understood under the assumption that the data samples are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Ethan Che , Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

This paper studies the last iterate of subgradient method with Polyak step size when applied to the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function with bounded subgradients. We show that the subgradient method with Polyak step size achieves a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-07-23 Moslem Zamani , François Glineur

Many particle-based Bayesian inference methods use a single global step size for all parts of the update. In Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), however, each update combines two qualitatively different effects: attraction toward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Arash Sarshar

We propose a new per-layer adaptive step-size procedure for stochastic first-order optimization methods for minimizing empirical loss functions in deep learning, eliminating the need for the user to tune the learning rate (LR). The proposed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-07 Achraf Bahamou , Donald Goldfarb

We propose an algorithm for the adaptation of the learning rate for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that avoids the need for validation set use. The idea for the adaptiveness comes from the technique of extrapolation: to get an estimate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-08-28 Antti Koskela , Antti Honkela

Classical stochastic gradient methods for optimization rely on noisy gradient approximations that become progressively less accurate as iterates approach a solution. The large noise and small signal in the resulting gradients makes it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-04-10 Soham De , Abhay Yadav , David Jacobs , Tom Goldstein

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

We analyze the complexity of biased stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where individual updates are corrupted by deterministic, i.e. biased error terms. We derive convergence results for smooth (non-convex) functions and give improved rates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Ahmad Ajalloeian , Sebastian U. Stich

Stochastic Gradient Descent with a constant learning rate (constant SGD) simulates a Markov chain with a stationary distribution. With this perspective, we derive several new results. (1) We show that constant SGD can be used as an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-23 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

The problem of designing adaptive stepsize sequences for the gradient descent method applied to convex and locally smooth functions is studied. We take an adaptive control perspective and design update rules for the stepsize that make use…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-27 Andrea Iannelli

We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Xiaoyu Wang , Ya-xiang Yuan