English
Related papers

Related papers: Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in Decentralized SGD

200 papers

In recent years, various notions of capacity and complexity have been proposed for characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in deep learning. Some of the popular notions that correlate well with the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli , Lingjiong Zhu

It has repeatedly been observed that loss minimization by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) leads to heavy-tailed distributions of neural network parameters. Here, we analyze a continuous diffusion approximation of SGD, called homogenized…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-05 Zhe Jiao , Martin Keller-Ressel

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

Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-12 Liam Hodgkinson , Michael W. Mahoney

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-24 Thanh Huy Nguyen , Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Gaël Richard

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 \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-12 Chao Sun , Huiming Zhang , Bo Chen , Li Yu

Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shuhua Yu , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinwen Zhang , Yihan Zhang , Heng Liang , Hongchang Gao

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

This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-19 Menglian Wang , Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

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

Heavy-tailed distributions are found throughout many naturally occurring phenomena. We have reviewed the models of stochastic dynamics that lead to heavy-tailed distributions (and power law distributions, in particular) including the…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2011-05-09 Ph. Blanchard , T. Krueger , D. Volchenkov

Gradient compression has surfaced as a key technique to address the challenge of communication efficiency in distributed learning. In distributed deep learning, however, it is observed that gradient distributions are heavy-tailed, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Guangfeng Yan , Tan Li , Yuanzhang Xiao , Hanxu Hou , Linqi Song

Heavy-tail phenomena in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been reported in several empirical studies. Experimental evidence in previous works suggests a strong interplay between the heaviness of the tails and generalization behavior of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Anant Raj , Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli

Neural network compression techniques have become increasingly popular as they can drastically reduce the storage and computation requirements for very large networks. Recent empirical studies have illustrated that even simple pruning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Melih Barsbey , Milad Sefidgaran , Murat A. Erdogdu , Gaël Richard , Umut Şimşekli

In this paper, the problem of distributed optimization is studied via a network of agents. Each agent only has access to a noisy gradient of its own objective function, and can communicate with its neighbors via a network. To handle this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-19 Yuchen Yang , Kaihong Lu , Long Wang

We propose a stochastic process driven by the memory effect with novel distributions which include both exponential and leptokurtic heavy-tailed distributions. A class of the distributions is analytically derived from the continuum limit of…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2012-03-27 Jongwook Kim , Teppei Okumura

In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Bo Chen , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang
‹ Prev 1 2 3 10 Next ›