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Despite their overwhelming capacity to overfit, deep neural networks trained by specific optimization algorithms tend to generalize well to unseen data. Recently, researchers explained it by investigating the implicit regularization effect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Bohan Wang , Qi Meng , Wei Chen , Tie-Yan Liu

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

Existing analysis of AdaGrad and other adaptive methods for smooth convex optimization is typically for functions with bounded domain diameter. In unconstrained problems, previous works guarantee an asymptotic convergence rate without an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Zijian Liu , Ta Duy Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy L. Nguyen

The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-22 Dimitris Oikonomou , Nicolas Loizou

In this paper we propose stochastic gradient-free methods and accelerated methods with momentum for solving stochastic optimization problems. All these methods rely on stochastic directions rather than stochastic gradients. We analyze the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-15 Xiaopeng Luo , Xin Xu

In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-24 Rajeeva L. Karandikar , M. Vidyasagar

While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Peng Xu , Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

One of the most widely used methods for solving large-scale stochastic optimization problems is distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (DASGD), a family of algorithms that result from parallelizing stochastic gradient descent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-07-08 Zhengyuan Zhou , Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nicholas Bambos , Peter W. Glynn , Yinyu Ye

Following the same routine as [SSJ20], we continue to present the theoretical analysis for stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGD with momentum) in this paper. Differently, for SGD with momentum, we demonstrate it is the two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Bin Shi

Momentum is known to accelerate the convergence of gradient descent in strongly convex settings without stochastic gradient noise. In stochastic optimization, such as training neural networks, folklore suggests that momentum may help deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Runzhe Wang , Sadhika Malladi , Tianhao Wang , Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li

The vast majority of successful deep neural networks are trained using variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms. Recent attempts to improve SGD can be broadly categorized into two approaches: (1) adaptive learning rate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-04 Michael R. Zhang , James Lucas , Geoffrey Hinton , Jimmy Ba

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Mitchell Scott , Tianshi Xu , Ziyuan Tang , Alexandra Pichette-Emmons , Qiang Ye , Yousef Saad , Yuanzhe Xi

In this paper, we investigate a general class of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms, called Conditioned SGD, based on a preconditioning of the gradient direction. Using a discrete-time approach with martingale tools, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-17 Rémi Leluc , François Portier

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) plays a central role in modern machine learning. While there is extensive work on providing error upper bound for SGD, not much is known about SGD error lower bound. In this paper, we study the convergence…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-21 Zhiyan Ding , Yiding Chen , Qin Li , Xiaojin Zhu

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

We study trade-offs between convergence rate and robustness to gradient errors in the context of first-order methods. Our focus is on generalized momentum methods (GMMs)--a broad class that includes Nesterov's accelerated gradient,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-14 Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Yasa Syed , Necdet Serhat Aybat

In this work we investigate stochastic non-convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth loss functions, and the goal is to find an approximate stationary point. The most popular approach to handling such…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-02 Kfir Y. Levy , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the standard numerical method used to solve the core optimization problem for the vast majority of machine learning (ML) algorithms. In the context of large scale learning, as utilized by many Big Data…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-10-06 Janis Keuper , Franz-Josef Pfreundt

We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-04 Jingfeng Wu , Pierre Marion , Peter Bartlett