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In this paper, we address stochastic optimization problems involving a composition of a non-smooth outer function and a smooth inner function, a formulation frequently encountered in machine learning and operations research. To deal with…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-15 Tommaso Giovannelli , Jingfu Tan , Luis Nunes Vicente

Stochastic gradient optimization methods are broadly used to minimize non-convex smooth objective functions, for instance when training deep neural networks. However, theoretical guarantees on the asymptotic behaviour of these methods…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-17 Jean-Baptiste Fest , Audrey Repetti , Emilie Chouzenoux

This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

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

This paper theoretically reanalyzes the convergence of the mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a structured minimization problem involving a finite-sum function with its gradient being stochastically approximated, and an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Runze Li , Jintao Xu , Wenxun Xing

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

We consider the problem of optimizing a high-dimensional convex function using stochastic zeroth-order queries. Under sparsity assumptions on the gradients or function values, we present two algorithms: a successive component/feature…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-27 Yining Wang , Simon Du , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Aarti Singh

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Eloi Tanguy

This paper introduces a novel approach to enhance the performance of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm by incorporating a modified decay step size based on $\frac{1}{\sqrt{t}}$. The proposed step size integrates a logarithmic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 M. Soheil Shamaee , S. Fathi Hafshejani

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

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

We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Andrea Schioppa

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-06 Zhongruo Wang , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Shiqian Ma , Meisam Razaviyayn

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

In recent literature, a general two step procedure has been formulated for solving the problem of phase retrieval. First, a spectral technique is used to obtain a constant-error initial estimate, following which, the estimate is refined to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-10 Yan Shuo Tan , Roman Vershynin

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

Inverse problems in scientific computing often require optimization over infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces. A commonly used solver in such settings is stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where gradients are approximated using randomly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Sandra Cerrai , Qin Li , Anjali Nair , Jaeyoung Yoon

This is a handbook of simple proofs of the convergence of gradient and stochastic gradient descent type methods. We consider functions that are Lipschitz, smooth, convex, strongly convex, and/or Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz functions. Our focus is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-12 Guillaume Garrigos , Robert M. Gower

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