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Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) enables scalable distributed training but suffers from gradient staleness. Existing mitigation strategies, such as delay-adaptive learning rates and staleness-aware filtering, typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tehila Dahan , Roie Reshef , Sharon Goldstein , Kfir Y. Levy

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are the main workhorses for solving large-scale optimization problems with nonconvex objective functions. Although the convergence of SGDs in the (strongly) convex case is well-understood,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Aritra Dutta , El Houcine Bergou , Soumia Boucherouite , Nicklas Werge , Melih Kandemir , Xin Li

This paper studies the stochastic distributed nonconvex optimization problem over a network of agents, where agents only access stochastic zeroth-order information about their local cost functions and collaboratively optimize the global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-01 Haonan Wang , Xinlei Yi , Yiguang Hong

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

We study to what extent may stochastic gradient descent (SGD) be understood as a "conventional" learning rule that achieves generalization performance by obtaining a good fit to training data. We consider the fundamental stochastic convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-13 Tomer Koren , Roi Livni , Yishay Mansour , Uri Sherman

Gradient methods are among the simplest yet most widely used algorithms for unconstrained optimization. Motivated by a geometric property of the steepest descent (SD) method that can alleviate the zigzag behavior in quadratic problems, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-21 Ya Shen , Qing-Na Li , Yu-Hong Dai

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main algorithm behind a large body of work in machine learning. In many cases, constraints are enforced via projections, leading to projected stochastic gradient algorithms. In recent years, a large…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-23 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Wei Liu

In this paper, we investigate the non-asymptotic stationary convergence behavior of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) for nonconvex optimization. We focus on a general class of nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic optimization problems, in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-14 Siqi Zhang , Niao He

We consider stochastic optimization problems involving an expected value of a nonlinear function of a base random vector and a conditional expectation of another function depending on the base random vector, a dependent random vector, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-20 Andrzej Ruszczyński , Shangzhe Yang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yury Demidovich , Grigory Malinovsky , Igor Sokolov , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is among the simplest and most popular methods in optimization. The convergence rate for SGD has been extensively studied and tight analyses have been established for the running average scheme, but the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-29 Daogao Liu , Zhou Lu

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the many iterative optimization methods that are widely used in solving machine learning problems. These methods display valuable properties and attract researchers and industrial machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-04 Farshed Abdukhakimov , Chulu Xiang , Dmitry Kamzolov , Martin Takáč

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is a widely used approach for solving stochastic optimization problems, but its convergence is typically slow. Existing variance reduction techniques, such as SAGA, improve convergence by…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-21 Fabio Nobile , Matteo Raviola , Nathan Schaeffer

The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Naoki Sato , Hideaki Iiduka

In this work, we focus on the study of stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order gradient information and uses only function evaluations. The problem of ZO optimization has emerged in many recent machine…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-22 Pranay Sharma , Kaidi Xu , Sijia Liu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xue Lin , Pramod K. Varshney

We analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Hadi Daneshmand , Jonas Kohler , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) now acts as a fundamental part of optimization in current machine learning. Meanwhile, deep learning architectures have shown outstanding performance in a wide range of fields, such as natural language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Zhao Song , Song Yue

Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-01-19 Youbang Sun , Mahyar Fazlyab , Shahin Shahrampour

In this paper we present an inexact zeroth-order method suitable for the solution nonsmooth and nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problems, in which the objective is split into a real-valued Lipschitz continuous stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-11 Spyridon Pougkakiotis , Dionysis Kalogerias