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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

We present adaptive gradient methods (both basic and accelerated) for solving convex composite optimization problems in which the main part is approximately smooth (a.k.a. $(\delta, L)$-smooth) and can be accessed only via a (potentially…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-11 Anton Rodomanov , Xiaowen Jiang , Sebastian Stich

We study adaptive methods for differentially private convex optimization, proposing and analyzing differentially private variants of a Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm with adaptive stepsizes, as well as the AdaGrad algorithm. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Hilal Asi , John Duchi , Alireza Fallah , Omid Javidbakht , Kunal Talwar

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-01 Ohad Shamir , Tong Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Tehila Dahan , Kfir Y. Levy

Heavy-ball momentum with decaying learning rates is widely used with SGD for optimizing deep learning models. In contrast to its empirical popularity, the understanding of its theoretical property is still quite limited, especially under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Rui Pan , Yuxing Liu , Xiaoyu Wang , Tong Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jun-Kun Wang , Chi-Heng Lin , Jacob Abernethy

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a popular tool in training large-scale machine learning models. Its performance, however, is highly variable, depending crucially on the choice of the step sizes. Accordingly, a variety of strategies for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-11 Xiaoyu Li , Zhenxun Zhuang , Francesco Orabona

Gradient-based iterative optimization methods are the workhorse of modern machine learning. They crucially rely on careful tuning of parameters like learning rate and momentum. However, one typically sets them using heuristic approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Dravyansh Sharma

Stochastic gradient descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Shen-Yi Zhao , Chang-Wei Shi , Yin-Peng Xie , Wu-Jun Li

Large-scale constrained optimization problems are at the core of many tasks in control, signal processing, and machine learning. Notably, problems with functional constraints arise when, beyond a performance{\nobreakdash-}centric goal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Antesh Upadhyay , Sang Bin Moon , Abolfazl Hashemi

Tuning hyperparameters, such as the stepsize, presents a major challenge of training machine learning models. To address this challenge, numerous adaptive optimization algorithms have been developed that achieve near-optimal complexities,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Florian Hübler , Junchi Yang , Xiang Li , Niao He

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Sharan Sahu , Cameron J. Hogan , Martin T. Wells

We introduce a novel algorithm for gradient-based optimization of stochastic objective functions. The method may be seen as a variant of SGD with momentum equipped with an adaptive learning rate automatically adjusted by an 'energy'…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-24 Hailiang Liu , Xuping Tian

We investigate the Randomized Stochastic Accelerated Gradient (RSAG) method, utilizing either constant or adaptive step sizes, for stochastic optimization problems with generalized smooth objective functions. Under relaxed affine variance…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-02-25 Chenhao Yu , Yusu Hong , Junhong Lin

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) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Ruinan Jin , Difei Cheng , Hong Qiao , Xin Shi , Shaodong Liu , Bo Zhang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-02 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang

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