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Modern machine learning models are typically trained via multi-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with small batch sizes, and understanding their dynamics in high dimensions is of great interest. However, an analytical framework for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Sota Nishiyama , Masaaki Imaizumi

While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

Stochastic gradient methods have been a popular and powerful choice of optimization methods, aimed at minimizing functions. Their advantage lies in the fact that that one approximates the gradient as opposed to using the full Jacobian…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-09-26 Neil K. Chada , Philip J. Herbert

Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Anant Raj , Melih Barsbey , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli

Heavy-Ball method (HB) is known for its simplicity in implementation and practical efficiency. However, as with other momentum methods, it has non-monotone behavior, and for optimal parameters, the method suffers from the so-called peak…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-11 Marina Danilova , Grigory Malinovsky

Accelerated gradient methods like Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient (NAG) achieve faster convergence on well-conditioned problems but often diverge on ill-conditioned or non-convex landscapes due to aggressive momentum accumulation. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Sarwan Ali

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) is a nonlinear generalization of the Langevin dynamics that incorporates a distribution-dependent drift, and it naturally arises from the optimization of two-layer neural networks via (noisy) gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Taiji Suzuki , Denny Wu , Atsushi Nitanda

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and variants have been surprisingly successful for training deep nets, several aspects of the optimization dynamics and generalization are still not well understood. In this paper, we present new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-26 Xinyan Li , Qilong Gu , Yingxue Zhou , Tiancong Chen , Arindam Banerjee

Deep neural networks achieve stellar generalisation even when they have enough parameters to easily fit all their training data. We study this phenomenon by analysing the dynamics and the performance of over-parameterised two-layer neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-28 Sebastian Goldt , Madhu S. Advani , Andrew M. Saxe , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborová

Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Hongjian Wang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

The algorithms used to train neural networks, like stochastic gradient descent (SGD), have close parallels to natural processes that navigate a high-dimensional parameter space -- for example protein folding or evolution. Our study uses a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Shishir Adhikari , Alkan Kabakçıoğlu , Alexander Strang , Deniz Yuret , Michael Hinczewski

We show that parametric models trained by a stochastic gradient method (SGM) with few iterations have vanishing generalization error. We prove our results by arguing that SGM is algorithmically stable in the sense of Bousquet and Elisseeff.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-09 Moritz Hardt , Benjamin Recht , Yoram Singer

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Persia Jana Kamali , Pierfrancesco Urbani

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

Stochastic Heavy Ball (SHB) and Nesterov's Accelerated Stochastic Gradient (ASG) are popular momentum methods in stochastic optimization. While benefits of such acceleration ideas in deterministic settings are well understood, their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Swetha Ganesh , Rohan Deb , Gugan Thoppe , Amarjit Budhiraja

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 analyze gradient descent with Polyak heavy-ball momentum (HB) whose fixed momentum parameter $\beta \in (0, 1)$ provides exponential decay of memory. Building on Kovachki and Stuart (2021), we prove that on an exponentially attractive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Matias D. Cattaneo , Boris Shigida

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-04 Xiaowu Dai , Yuhua Zhu