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Related papers: Heavy-Tail Phenomenon in Decentralized SGD

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An influential line of recent work has focused on the generalization properties of unregularized gradient-based learning procedures applied to separable linear classification with exponentially-tailed loss functions. The ability of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-24 Matan Schliserman , Tomer Koren

Long-tailed recognition suffers from a persistent head--tail trade-off: improving tail performance often degrades head accuracy and can increase training instability. Despite strong empirical results from re-weighting, decoupled training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Chang Chu , Qingyue Zhang , Shao-Lun Huang , Junxiong Zheng

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have attracted much attention due to their ability in learning representations from graph-structured data. Despite the successful applications of GNNs in many domains, the optimization of GNNs is less well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Langzhang Liang , Zenglin Xu , Zixing Song , Irwin King , Yuan Qi , Jieping Ye

The so-called partition function is a sample moment statistic based on blocks of data and it is often used in the context of multifractal processes. It will be shown that its behaviour is strongly influenced by the tail of the distribution…

Methodology · Statistics 2013-10-02 Danijel Grahovac , Mofei Jia , Nikolai N. Leonenko , Emanuele Taufer

Distributed stochastic optimization intertwines (i) stochastic gradient noise, (ii) communication compression, and (iii) adaptive/normalized updates. While each factor has been studied in isolation, their joint effect under realistic…

Decentralized stochastic gradient method emerges as a promising solution for solving large-scale machine learning problems. This paper studies the decentralized Markov chain gradient descent (DMGD) algorithm - a variant of the decentralized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Tao Sun , Dongsheng Li

The decentralized gradient descent (DGD) algorithm, and its sibling, diffusion, are workhorses in decentralized machine learning, distributed inference and estimation, and multi-agent coordination. We propose a novel, principled framework…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-06-04 Erik G. Larsson , Nicolo Michelusi

It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Pan Zhou , Jiashi Feng , Chao Ma , Caiming Xiong , Steven Hoi , Weinan E

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

Various molecular interaction networks have been claimed to follow power-law decay for their global connectivity distribution. It has been proposed that there may be underlying generative models that explain this heavy-tailed behavior by…

Molecular Networks · Quantitative Biology 2010-04-20 Adrián López García de Lomana , Qasim K. Beg , G. de Fabritiis , Jordi Villà-Freixa

Unraveling the reasons behind the remarkable success and exceptional generalization capabilities of deep neural networks presents a formidable challenge. Recent insights from random matrix theory, specifically those concerning the spectral…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-10 Xuanzhe Xiao , Zeng Li , Chuanlong Xie , Fengwei Zhou

Distributed optimization has become the default training paradigm in modern machine learning due to the growing scale of models and datasets. To mitigate communication overhead, local updates are often applied before global aggregation,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Su Hyeong Lee , Manzil Zaheer , Tian Li

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

We analyze the convergence of gradient-based optimization algorithms that base their updates on delayed stochastic gradient information. The main application of our results is to the development of gradient-based distributed optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2011-05-02 Alekh Agarwal , John C. Duchi

Real-world data are long-tailed, the lack of tail samples leads to a significant limitation in the generalization ability of the model. Although numerous approaches of class re-balancing perform well for moderate class imbalance problems,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Yanbiao Ma , Licheng Jiao , Fang Liu , Shuyuan Yang , Xu Liu , Puhua Chen

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and its variations have been effectively used to optimize neural network models. However, with the rapid growth of big data and deep learning, SGD is no longer the most suitable choice due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Anuraganand Sharma

We discover restrained numerical instabilities in current training practices of deep networks with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), and its variants. We show numerical error (on the order of the smallest floating point bit and thus the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Yuxin Sun , Dong Lao , Ganesh Sundaramoorthi , Anthony Yezzi

Distributed optimization plays an important role in modern large-scale machine learning and data processing systems by optimizing the utilization of computational resources. One of the classical and popular approaches is Local Stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-19 Andrey Sadchikov , Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Alexander Gasnikov

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a fundamental iterative framework with broad applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Classical analyses typically rely on martingale difference or Markov noise with bounded second moments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siddharth Chandak , Anuj Yadav , Ayfer Ozgur , Nicholas Bambos

Exploring noise distributions beyond Gaussian in diffusion models remains an open challenge. While Gaussian-based models succeed within a unified SDE framework, recent studies suggest that heavy-tailed noise distributions, like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Dario Shariatian , Umut Simsekli , Alain Durmus