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Constant-stepsize stochastic approximation (SA) is widely used in learning for computational efficiency. For a fixed stepsize, the iterates typically admit a stationary distribution that is rarely tractable. Prior work shows that as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zedong Wang , Yuyang Wang , Ijay Narang , Felix Wang , Yuzhou Wang , Siva Theja Maguluri

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the classical central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Umut Simsekli , Levent Sagun , Mert Gurbuzbalaban

Stochastic differential equations (SDEs) have been shown recently to characterize well the dynamics of training machine learning models with SGD. When the generalization error of the SDE approximation closely aligns with that of SGD in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Ziqiao Wang , Yongyi Mao

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy

We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-07 Dusan Jakovetic , Dragana Bajovic , Anit Kumar Sahu , Soummya Kar , Nemanja Milosevic , Dusan Stamenkovic

The empirical evidence indicates that stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise is more appropriate to characterize the training of machine learning models than that with standard bounded gradient variance noise. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Hongxu Chen , Ke Wei , Xiaoming Yuan , Luo Luo

Generalization error bounds for deep neural networks trained by stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are derived by combining a dynamical control of an appropriate parameter norm and the Rademacher complexity estimate based on parameter norms.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Mingze Wang , Chao Ma

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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a widely deployed optimization procedure throughout data-driven and simulation-driven disciplines, which has drawn a substantial interest in understanding its global behavior across a broad class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-02 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang

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

While significant theoretical progress has been achieved, unveiling the generalization mystery of overparameterized neural networks still remains largely elusive. In this paper, we study the generalization behavior of shallow neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-21 Yunwen Lei , Rong Jin , Yiming Ying

This paper presents a new generalization error analysis for Decentralized Stochastic Gradient Descent (D-SGD) based on algorithmic stability. The obtained results overhaul a series of recent works that suggested an increased instability due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Batiste Le Bars , Aurélien Bellet , Marc Tommasi , Kevin Scaman , Giovanni Neglia

Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-25 Soon Hoe Lim , Yijun Wan , Umut Şimşekli

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

We develop generalization error bounds for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with label noise in non-convex settings under uniform dissipativity and smoothness conditions. Under a suitable choice of semimetric, we establish a contraction in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-02 Jung Eun Huh , Patrick Rebeschini

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajović , Dušan Jakovetić , Soummya Kar , Ali H. Sayed

In this paper, we propose a new covering technique localized for the trajectories of SGD. This localization provides an algorithm-specific complexity measured by the covering number, which can have dimension-independent cardinality in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-09-20 Sejun Park , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performed in an asynchronous manner plays a crucial role in training large-scale machine learning models. However, the generalization performance of asynchronous delayed SGD, which is an essential metric…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Xiaoge Deng , Li Shen , Shengwei Li , Tao Sun , Dongsheng Li , Dacheng Tao

Despite the ubiquitous use of stochastic optimization algorithms in machine learning, the precise impact of these algorithms and their dynamics on generalization performance in realistic non-convex settings is still poorly understood. While…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-12 Liam Hodgkinson , Umut Şimşekli , Rajiv Khanna , Michael W. Mahoney

Optimal Transport has sparked vivid interest in recent years, in particular thanks to the Wasserstein distance, which provides a geometrically sensible and intuitive way of comparing probability measures. For computational reasons, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Eloi Tanguy