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Understanding the generalization properties of optimization algorithms under heavy-tailed noise has gained growing attention. However, the existing theoretical results mainly focus on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the analysis of…

Gradient clipping is a standard safeguard for training neural networks under noisy, heavy-tailed stochastic gradients; yet, most clipping rules treat all parameters as vectors and ignore the matrix structure of modern architectures. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Alexander Yukhimchuk , Mladen Kolar , Martin Takáč , Sayantan Choudhury

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Umut Simsekli , Levent Sagun , Mert Gurbuzbalaban

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 (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-01 Ohad Shamir , Tong Zhang

Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Zijian Liu

Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Anant Raj , Melih Barsbey , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Melinda Hagedorn , Florian Jarre

Recently, the study of heavy-tailed noises in first-order nonconvex stochastic optimization has gotten a lot of attention since it was recognized as a more realistic condition as suggested by many empirical observations. Specifically, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-30 Zijian Liu , Zhengyuan Zhou

While the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient methods are well understood \emph{in expectation}, there still exist many gaps in the understanding of their convergence with \emph{high probability}, where the convergence rate has a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-04 Ta Duy Nguyen , Thien Hang Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy Le Nguyen

We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-23 Sasila Ilandarideva , Anatoli Juditsky , Guanghui Lan , Tianjiao Li

Gradient clipping is a widely used technique in Machine Learning and Deep Learning (DL), known for its effectiveness in mitigating the impact of heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in the training of large language models.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

We develop a worst-case complexity theory for stochastically preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (SPSGD) and its accelerated variants under heavy-tailed noise, a setting that encompasses widely used adaptive methods such as Adam,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuchen Fang , James Demmel , Javad Lavaei

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the \emph{de facto} algorithm in deep learning, adaptive methods like Clipped SGD/Adam have been observed to outperform SGD across important tasks, such as attention models. The settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-26 Jingzhao Zhang , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Andreas Veit , Seungyeon Kim , Sashank J Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar , Suvrit Sra

In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Mingze Wang , Lei Wu

In this paper, we propose a new accelerated stochastic first-order method called clipped-SSTM for smooth convex stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed distributed noise in stochastic gradients and derive the first high-probability…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-26 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , Alexander Gasnikov

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

There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

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