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Randomized zeroth-order methods are classically analyzed in expectation, but a black-box Markov conversion can give misleading high-probability guarantees, in particular by forcing the finite-difference smoothing radius to shrink with the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Haishan Ye

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

We study population convergence guarantees of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for smooth convex objectives in the interpolation regime, where the noise at optimum is zero or near zero. The behavior of the last iterate of SGD in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Amit Attia , Matan Schliserman , Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren

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 gradient descent (SGD) has been widely studied in the literature from different angles, and is commonly employed for solving many big data machine learning problems. However, the averaging technique, which combines all iterative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Zhishuai Guo , Yan Yan , Tianbao Yang

We establish the asymptotic implicit bias of gradient descent (GD) for generic non-homogeneous deep networks under exponential loss. Specifically, we characterize three key properties of GD iterates starting from a sufficiently small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Yuhang Cai , Kangjie Zhou , Jingfeng Wu , Song Mei , Michael Lindsey , Peter L. Bartlett

Recent research has observed that in machine learning optimization, gradient descent (GD) often operates at the edge of stability (EoS) [Cohen, et al., 2021], where the stepsizes are set to be large, resulting in non-monotonic losses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Jason D. Lee

Past research has indicated that the covariance of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) error done via minibatching plays a critical role in determining its regularization and escape from low potential points. Motivated by some new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-02 Riddhiman Bhattacharya , Tiefeng Jiang

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

Empirical studies show that gradient-based methods can learn deep neural networks (DNNs) with very good generalization performance in the over-parameterization regime, where DNNs can easily fit a random labeling of the training data. Very…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-28 Yuan Cao , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performed in an asynchronous manner plays a crucial role in training large-scale machine learning models. However, the generalization performance of asynchronous delayed SGD, which is an essential metric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiaoge Deng , Li Shen , Shengwei Li , Tao Sun , Dongsheng Li , Dacheng Tao

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-10 Lam M. Nguyen , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Marten van Dijk , Peter Richtárik , Katya Scheinberg , Martin Takáč

The main aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of gradient descent (GD) algorithms with gradient errors that do not necessarily vanish, asymptotically. In particular, sufficient conditions are presented for both stability (almost sure…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-09-19 Arunselvan Ramaswamy , Shalabh Bhatnagar

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…

This article examines the implicit regularization effect of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). We consider the case of SGD without replacement, the variant typically used to optimize large-scale neural networks. We analyze this algorithm in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Pierfrancesco Beneventano

In this paper, we propose a novel kernel stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm for large-scale supervised learning with general losses. Compared to traditional kernel SGD, our algorithm improves efficiency and scalability through an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Jinhui Bai , Andreas Christmann , Lei Shi

Traditional analyses in non-convex optimization typically rely on the smoothness assumption, namely requiring the gradients to be Lipschitz. However, recent evidence shows that this smoothness condition does not capture the properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-25 Michael Crawshaw , Mingrui Liu , Francesco Orabona , Wei Zhang , Zhenxun Zhuang

In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-05 Cong Fang , Zhouchen Lin , Tong Zhang

The increasing scale of data propels the popularity of leveraging parallelism to speed up the optimization. Minibatch stochastic gradient descent (minibatch SGD) and local SGD are two popular methods for parallel optimization. The existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yunwen Lei , Tao Sun , Mingrui Liu