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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-11 Christopher De Sa , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-21 Nahom Seyoum , Haoxiang You

Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a nonparametric particle-based deterministic sampling algorithm. Despite its wide usage, understanding the theoretical properties of SVGD has remained a challenging problem. For sampling from a…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-31 Tianle Liu , Promit Ghosal , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Natesh S. Pillai

We study the existence and long-time asymptotics of weak solutions to a system of two nonlinear drift-diffusion equations that has a gradient flow structure in the Wasserstein distance. The two equations are coupled through a…

Analysis of PDEs · Mathematics 2021-12-14 Lisa Beck , Daniel Matthes , Martina Zizza

Stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) is a fundamental algorithm in stochastic optimization. Recent work by Zhang et al. [2017] presents an analysis for the hitting time of SGLD for the first and second order stationary points. The…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-03-17 Xi Chen , Simon S. Du , Xin T. Tong

We present a convergence rate analysis for biased stochastic gradient descent (SGD), where individual gradient updates are corrupted by computation errors. We develop stochastic quadratic constraints to formulate a small linear matrix…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-31 Bin Hu , Peter Seiler , Laurent Lessard

We study the underdamped Langevin diffusion when the log of the target distribution is smooth and strongly concave. We present a MCMC algorithm based on its discretization and show that it achieves $\varepsilon$ error (in 2-Wasserstein…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-01-30 Xiang Cheng , Niladri S. Chatterji , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan

Gradient descent (GD) is known to converge quickly for convex objective functions, but it can be trapped at local minima. On the other hand, Langevin dynamics (LD) can explore the state space and find global minima, but in order to give…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-17 Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

Hogwild! implements asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) where multiple threads in parallel access a common repository containing training data, perform SGD iterations and update shared state that represents a jointly learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Marten van Dijk , Nhuong V. Nguyen , Toan N. Nguyen , Lam M. Nguyen , Quoc Tran-Dinh , Phuong Ha Nguyen

Score-based Generative Models (SGMs) have achieved impressive performance in data generation across a wide range of applications and benefit from strong theoretical guarantees. Recently, methods inspired by statistical mechanics, in…

The mean-field Langevin dynamics (MFLD) minimizes an entropy-regularized nonlinear convex functional on the Wasserstein space over $\mathbb{R}^d$, and has gained attention recently as a model for the gradient descent dynamics of interacting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Anming Gu , Juno Kim

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

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

Non-convex optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, especially in Deep Learning. While such complex problems can often be successfully optimized in practice by using stochastic gradient descent (SGD), theoretical analysis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Harsh Vardhan , Sebastian U. Stich

In this note we give a simple proof for the convergence of stochastic gradient (SGD) methods on $\mu$-convex functions under a (milder than standard) $L$-smoothness assumption. We show that for carefully chosen stepsizes SGD converges after…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Sebastian U. Stich

To deal with stochastic hybrid systems with general state-dependent switching, we propose an approximation method by a sequence of stochastic hybrid systems with piecewise constant type switching. The convergence rate in the Wasserstein…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-05-17 Jinghai Shao , Lingdi Wang , Qiong Wu

As sample sizes grow, scalability has become a central concern in the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. One general approach to this problem, exemplified by the popular stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD)…

Computation · Statistics 2024-12-04 Natesh S. Pillai , Aaron Smith , Azeem Zaman

The problem of efficiently generating random samples from high-dimensional and non-log-concave posterior measures arising from nonlinear regression problems is considered. Extending investigations from arXiv:2009.05298, local and global…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-04-18 Jan Bohr , Richard Nickl

We study the quantitative convergence of drift-diffusion PDEs that arise as Wasserstein gradient flows of linearly convex functions over the space of probability measures on ${\mathbb R}^d$. In this setting, the objective is in general not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-17 Lénaïc Chizat , Maria Colombo , Xavier Fernández-Real

We prove quantitative convergence rates at which discrete Langevin-like processes converge to the invariant distribution of a related stochastic differential equation. We study the setup where the additive noise can be non-Gaussian and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Xiang Cheng , Dong Yin , Peter L. Bartlett , Michael I. Jordan