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Stochastic descent methods (of the gradient and mirror varieties) have become increasingly popular in optimization. In fact, it is now widely recognized that the success of deep learning is not only due to the special deep architecture of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Navid Azizan , Babak Hassibi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants form the backbone of deep learning optimization, yet the underlying dynamics of their gradient behavior remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we reinterpret gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Zhipeng Yao , Rui Yu , Guisong Chang , Ying Li , Yu Zhang , Dazhou Li

We present a theoretical analysis of stochastic optimization methods in terms of their sensitivity with respect to the step size. We identify a key quantity that, for each method, describes how the performance degrades as the step size…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Fabian Schaipp , Robert M. Gower , Adrien Taylor

An increasing number of machine learning problems, such as robust or adversarial variants of existing algorithms, require minimizing a loss function that is itself defined as a maximum. Carrying a loop of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-29 Othmane Sebbouh , Marco Cuturi , Gabriel Peyré

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Adaptive gradient methods have attracted much attention of machine learning communities due to the high efficiency. However their acceleration effect in practice, especially in neural network training, is hard to analyze, theoretically. The…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-15 Xunpeng Huang , Hao Zhou , Runxin Xu , Zhe Wang , Lei Li

We present a theoretical analysis of some popular adaptive Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods in the small learning rate regime. Using the stochastic modified equations framework introduced by Li et al., we derive effective…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-29 Luca Callisti , Marco Romito , Francesco Triggiano

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

Commonly used optimization algorithms often show a trade-off between good generalization and fast training times. For instance, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) tends to have good generalization; however, adaptive gradient methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Aditya Cowsik , Tankut Can , Paolo Glorioso

A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-22 Kfir Y. Levy

We develop a high-dimensional scaling limit for Stochastic Gradient Descent with Polyak Momentum (SGD-M) and adaptive step-sizes. This provides a framework to rigourously compare online SGD with some of its popular variants. We show that…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Aukosh Jagannath , Taj Jones-McCormick , Varnan Sarangian

We study the performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on smooth and strongly-convex finite-sum optimization problems. In contrast to the majority of existing theoretical works, which assume that individual functions are sampled with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Itay Safran , Ohad Shamir

We consider a class of stochastic smooth convex optimization problems under rather general assumptions on the noise in the stochastic gradient observation. As opposed to the classical problem setting in which the variance of noise is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-23 Sasila Ilandarideva , Anatoli Juditsky , Guanghui Lan , Tianjiao Li

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main approach for training deep networks: it moves towards the optimum of the cost function by iteratively updating the parameters of a model in the direction of the gradient of the loss evaluated on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Loris Nanni , Gianluca Maguolo , Alessandra Lumini

Momentum plays a crucial role in stochastic gradient-based optimization algorithms for accelerating or improving training deep neural networks (DNNs). In deep learning practice, the momentum is usually weighted by a well-calibrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Bao Wang , Qiang Ye

We propose AEGD, a new algorithm for first-order gradient-based optimization of non-convex objective functions, based on a dynamically updated energy variable. The method is shown to be unconditionally energy stable, irrespective of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-04 Hailiang Liu , Xuping Tian

In this work, we consider smooth unconstrained optimization problems and we deal with the class of gradient methods with momentum, i.e., descent algorithms where the search direction is defined as a linear combination of the current…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-04 Matteo Lapucci , Giampaolo Liuzzi , Stefano Lucidi , Davide Pucci , Marco Sciandrone

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam have gained extreme popularity due to their success in training complex neural networks and less sensitivity to hyperparameter tuning compared to SGD. However, it has been recently shown that Adam can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Pedro Savarese

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