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Large-scale nonconvex optimization problems are ubiquitous in modern machine learning, and among practitioners interested in solving them, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) reigns supreme. We revisit the analysis of SGD in the nonconvex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-27 Ahmed Khaled , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

Optimization problem, which is aimed at finding the global minimal value of a given cost function, is one of the central problem in science and engineering. Various numerical methods have been proposed to solve this problem, among which the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-07 Shaojun Dong , Fengyu Le , Meng Zhang , Si-Jing Tao , Chao Wang , Yong-Jian Han , Guo-Ping Guo

The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence plays a central role in probabilistic machine learning, where it commonly serves as the canonical loss function. Optimization in such settings is often performed over the probability simplex, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Adwait Datar , Nihat Ay

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-07 Brian Swenson , Ryan Murray , H. Vincent Poor , Soummya Kar

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Xiaoyu Li

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Xufeng Cai , Cheuk Yin Lin , Jelena Diakonikolas

We study the classical optimization problem $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x)$ and analyze the gradient descent (GD) method in both nonconvex and convex settings. It is well-known that, under the $L$-smoothness assumption ($\|\nabla^2 f(x)\|…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-30 Alexander Tyurin

In this paper we investigate the generalization error of gradient descent (GD) applied to an $\ell_2$-regularized OLS objective function in the linear model. Based on our analysis we develop new methodology for computationally tractable and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-01-27 Thomas Stark , Lukas Steinberger

The (gradient-based) bilevel programming framework is widely used in hyperparameter optimization and has achieved excellent performance empirically. Previous theoretical work mainly focuses on its optimization properties, while leaving the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Fan Bao , Guoqiang Wu , Chongxuan Li , Jun Zhu , Bo Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have established themselves as the go-to algorithms for large-scale machine learning problems with independent samples due to their generalization performance and intrinsic computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Hao Chen , Lili Zheng , Raed Al Kontar , Garvesh Raskutti

Large learning rates, when applied to gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, yield various implicit biases including the edge of stability (Cohen et al., 2021), balancing (Wang et al., 2022), and catapult (Lewkowycz et al., 2020).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Yuqing Wang , Zhenghao Xu , Tuo Zhao , Molei Tao

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Jerry Chee , Ping Li

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari , Phan-Minh Nguyen

We propose graph-dependent implicit regularisation strategies for distributed stochastic subgradient descent (Distributed SGD) for convex problems in multi-agent learning. Under the standard assumptions of convexity, Lipschitz continuity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-20 Dominic Richards , Patrick Rebeschini

We introduce a perturbed preconditioned gradient descent (PPGD) method for the unconstrained minimization of a strongly convex objective $G$ with a locally Lipschitz continuous gradient. We assume that $G(v)=E(v)+F(v)$ and that the gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Jea-Hyun Park , Abner J. Salgado , Steven M. Wise

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

We establish novel generalization bounds for learning algorithms that converge to global minima. We do so by deriving black-box stability results that only depend on the convergence of a learning algorithm and the geometry around the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-10-25 Zachary Charles , Dimitris Papailiopoulos