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Non-convex optimization problems are challenging to solve; the success and computational expense of a gradient descent algorithm or variant depend heavily on the initialization strategy. Often, either random initialization is used or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Kartik Ahuja , Amit Dhurandhar , Kush R. Varshney

This study explores the sample complexity for two-layer neural networks to learn a generalized linear target function under Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), focusing on the challenging regime where many flat directions are present at…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-04 Luca Arnaboldi , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro , Ludovic Stephan

Adaptive gradient methods such as Adam have gained increasing popularity in deep learning optimization. However, it has been observed that compared with (stochastic) gradient descent, Adam can converge to a different solution with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-26 Difan Zou , Yuan Cao , Yuanzhi Li , Quanquan Gu

The increasing scale of data propels the popularity of leveraging parallelism to speed up the optimization. Minibatch stochastic gradient descent (minibatch SGD) and local SGD are two popular methods for parallel optimization. The existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yunwen Lei , Tao Sun , Mingrui Liu

We study optimization algorithms based on variance reduction for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Remarkable recent progress has been made in this direction through development of algorithms like SAG, SVRG, SAGA. These algorithms have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Sashank J. Reddi , Ahmed Hefny , Suvrit Sra , Barnabás Póczos , Alex Smola

Shuffling strategies for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), including incremental gradient, shuffle-once, and random reshuffling, are supported by rigorous convergence analyses for arbitrary within-epoch permutations. In particular, random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Lam M. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Jayant Kalagnanam

Stochastic graph neural networks (SGNNs) are information processing architectures that learn representations from data over random graphs. SGNNs are trained with respect to the expected performance, which comes with no guarantee about…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-03-22 Zhan Gao , Elvin Isufi

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

It is well known that neural networks with rectified linear units (ReLU) activation functions are positively scale-invariant. Conventional algorithms like stochastic gradient descent optimize the neural networks in the vector space of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-03-24 Qi Meng , Shuxin Zheng , Huishuai Zhang , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Adam is the de facto optimization algorithm for several deep learning applications, but an understanding of its implicit bias and how it differs from other algorithms, particularly standard first-order methods such as (stochastic) gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Bhavya Vasudeva , Jung Whan Lee , Vatsal Sharan , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

The implementation of a vast majority of machine learning (ML) algorithms boils down to solving a numerical optimization problem. In this context, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods have long proven to provide good results, both in…

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

Existing theory suggests that for linear regression problems categorized by capacity and source conditions, gradient descent (GD) is always minimax optimal, while both ridge regression and online stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-23 Jingfeng Wu , Peter L. Bartlett , Jason D. Lee , Sham M. Kakade , Bin Yu

How can local-search methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoid bad local minima in training multi-layer neural networks? Why can they fit random labels even given non-convex and non-smooth architectures? Most existing theory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li , Zhao Song

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising method for solving large-scale inverse problems, due to its excellent scalability with respect to data size. The current mathematical theory in the lens of regularization theory predicts that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-10 Bangti Jin , Zehui Zhou , Jun Zou

The multiplicative structure of parameters and input data in the first layer of neural networks is explored to build connection between the landscape of the loss function with respect to parameters and the landscape of the model function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Chao Ma , Lexing Ying

A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Xiaoyu Wang , Mikael Johansson

Stochastic convex optimization algorithms are the most popular way to train machine learning models on large-scale data. Scaling up the training process of these models is crucial, but the most popular algorithm, Stochastic Gradient Descent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-30 Ashok Cutkosky , Robert Busa-Fekete

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a cornerstone algorithm for high-dimensional optimization, renowned for its empirical successes. Recent theoretical advances have provided a deep understanding of how SGD enables feature learning in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Nived Rajaraman , Yanjun Han

The success of deep neural networks hinges on our ability to accurately and efficiently optimize high-dimensional, non-convex functions. In this paper, we empirically investigate the loss functions of state-of-the-art networks, and how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-11 Daniel Jiwoong Im , Michael Tao , Kristin Branson

We show that unconverged stochastic gradient descent can be interpreted as a procedure that samples from a nonparametric variational approximate posterior distribution. This distribution is implicitly defined as the transformation of an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-04-07 Dougal Maclaurin , David Duvenaud , Ryan P. Adams