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Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-08-13 Thomas M. Breuel

Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ansh Nagwekar

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-19 Mor Shpigel Nacson , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-10-05 Arnulf Jentzen , Philippe von Wurstemberger

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

In many numerical simulations stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type optimization methods perform very effectively in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) but till this day it remains an open problem of research to provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Martin Hutzenthaler , Arnulf Jentzen , Katharina Pohl , Adrian Riekert , Luca Scarpa

Multi-layer neural networks are among the most powerful models in machine learning, yet the fundamental reasons for this success defy mathematical understanding. Learning a neural network requires to optimize a non-convex high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-08 Song Mei , Andrea Montanari , Phan-Minh Nguyen

We investigate the convergence rates and data sample sizes required for training a machine learning model using a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, where data points are sampled based on either their loss value or uncertainty…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Daniel Haimovich , Dima Karamshuk , Fridolin Linder , Niek Tax , Milan Vojnovic

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Haiping Huang , Taro Toyoizumi

Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Alexandru Meterez , Depen Morwani , Costin-Andrei Oncescu , Jingfeng Wu , Cengiz Pehlevan , Sham Kakade

This paper considers a canonical problem in kernel regression: how good are the model performances when it is trained by the popular online first-order algorithms, compared to the offline ones, such as ridge and ridgeless regression? In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-29 Haihan Zhang , Weicheng Lin , Yuanshi Liu , Cong Fang

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an important algorithm in machine learning. With constant learning rates, it is a stochastic process that, after an initial phase of convergence, generates samples from a stationary distribution. We show…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-12 Stephan Mandt , Matthew D. Hoffman , David M. Blei

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient methods is a central problem in modern machine learning. Recent work has highlighted diagonal linear networks as a simplified yet expressive setting for analyzing the optimization and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Begoña García Malaxechebarría , Courtney Paquette , Maryam Fazel , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

One of the mysteries in the success of neural networks is randomly initialized first order methods like gradient descent can achieve zero training loss even though the objective function is non-convex and non-smooth. This paper demystifies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-06 Simon S. Du , Xiyu Zhai , Barnabas Poczos , Aarti Singh

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

Despite the non-convex optimization landscape, over-parametrized shallow networks are able to achieve global convergence under gradient descent. The picture can be radically different for narrow networks, which tend to get stuck in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-16 Rodrigo Veiga , Ludovic Stephan , Bruno Loureiro , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

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

We study the problem of training deep neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function using gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent. In particular, we study the binary classification problem and show that for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Difan Zou , Yuan Cao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

We investigate how the final parameters found by stochastic gradient descent are influenced by over-parameterization. We generate families of models by increasing the number of channels in a base network, and then perform a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-10 Daniel S. Park , Jascha Sohl-Dickstein , Quoc V. Le , Samuel L. Smith