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Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a standard approach to privacy-preserving learning based on per-example clipping, subsampling, Gaussian perturbation, and privacy accounting. Classical DP-SGD releases a noisy…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Mohammad Partohaghighi , Roummel Marcia

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been a go-to algorithm for nonconvex stochastic optimization problems arising in machine learning. Its theory however often requires a strong framework to guarantee convergence properties. We hereby…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-11 Azar Louzi

Recent theoretical studies have shown that heavy-tails can emerge in stochastic optimization due to `multiplicative noise', even under surprisingly simple settings, such as linear regression with Gaussian data. While these studies have…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu , Umut Simsekli , Kun Yuan , Lingjiong Zhu

We study the limits and capability of public-data assisted differentially private (PA-DP) algorithms. Specifically, we focus on the problem of stochastic convex optimization (SCO) with either labeled or unlabeled public data. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-07 Enayat Ullah , Michael Menart , Raef Bassily , Cristóbal Guzmán , Raman Arora

We consider a first order stochastic optimization framework where, at each iteration, $K$ independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) data point samples are drawn, based on which stochastic gradients can be queried. We allow gradient noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Manojlo Vukovic , Dusan Jakovetic

Differentially private distributed stochastic optimization has become a hot topic due to the urgent need of privacy protection in distributed stochastic optimization. In this paper, two-time scale stochastic approximation-type algorithms…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-03-19 Jimin Wang , Ji-Feng Zhang

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 vanilla Differentially-Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD), including DP-Adam and other variants, ensures the privacy of training data by uniformly distributing privacy costs across training steps. The equivalent privacy costs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Jian Du , Song Li , Xiangyi Chen , Siheng Chen , Mingyi Hong

Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Tao Sun , Xinwang Liu , Kun Yuan

This paper proposes a differentially private gradient-tracking-based distributed stochastic optimization algorithm over directed graphs. In particular, privacy noises are incorporated into each agent's state and tracking variable to…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Jialong Chen , Jimin Wang , Ji-Feng Zhang

In this paper, we study the performance of a large family of SGD variants in the smooth nonconvex regime. To this end, we propose a generic and flexible assumption capable of accurate modeling of the second moment of the stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-15 Zhize Li , Peter Richtárik

Machine learning (ML) models trained by differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) have much lower utility than the non-private ones. To mitigate this degradation, we propose a DP Laplacian smoothing SGD (DP-LSSGD) to train…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Bao Wang , Quanquan Gu , March Boedihardjo , Farzin Barekat , Stanley J. Osher

Training differentially private machine learning models requires constraining an individual's contribution to the optimization process. This is achieved by clipping the $2$-norm of their gradient at a predetermined threshold prior to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Filippo Galli , Catuscia Palamidessi , Tommaso Cucinotta

We study algorithms for online change-point detection (OCPD), where samples that are potentially heavy-tailed, are presented one at a time and a change in the underlying mean must be detected as early as possible. We present an algorithm…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-07-04 Abishek Sankararaman , Balakrishnan , Narayanaswamy

Stochastic optimization is a pivotal enabler in modern machine learning, producing effective models for various tasks. However, several existing works have shown that model parameters and gradient information are susceptible to privacy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Zhanhong Jiang , Md Zahid Hasan , Nastaran Saadati , Aditya Balu , Chao Liu , Soumik Sarkar

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

Differential privacy (DP) has become a prevalent privacy model in a wide range of machine learning tasks, especially after the debut of DP-SGD. However, DP-SGD, which directly perturbs gradients in the training iterations, fails to mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Jiawei Duan , Haibo Hu , Qingqing Ye , Xinyue Sun

There are several applications of stochastic optimization where one can benefit from a robust estimate of the gradient. For example, domains such as distributed learning with corrupted nodes, the presence of large outliers in the training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-30 Fabian Schaipp , Guillaume Garrigos , Umut Simsekli , Robert Gower

Gradient clipping is a popular modification to standard (stochastic) gradient descent, at every iteration limiting the gradient norm to a certain value $c >0$. It is widely used for example for stabilizing the training of deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Anastasia Koloskova , Hadrien Hendrikx , Sebastian U. Stich

In this work, we introduce a differentially private method for generating synthetic data from vertically partitioned data, \emph{i.e.}, where data of the same individuals is distributed across multiple data holders or parties. We present a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-05 Razane Tajeddine , Joonas Jälkö , Samuel Kaski , Antti Honkela