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We study the gradient descent (GD) dynamics of a depth-2 linear neural network with a single input and output. We show that GD converges at an explicit linear rate to a global minimum of the training loss, even with a large stepsize --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Blake Woodworth

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Vivak Patel

Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Lei Chen , Joan Bruna

We study accelerated optimization methods in the Gaussian phase retrieval problem. In this setting, we prove that gradient methods with Polyak or Nesterov momentum have similar implicit regularization to gradient descent. This implicit…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-23 Tyler Maunu , Martin Molina-Fructuoso

A widely believed explanation for the remarkable generalization capacities of overparameterized neural networks is that the optimization algorithms used for training induce an implicit bias towards benign solutions. To grasp this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Maria Matveev , Vit Fojtik , Hung-Hsu Chou , Gitta Kutyniok , Johannes Maly

In this work, we investigate the effect of momentum on the optimisation trajectory of gradient descent. We leverage a continuous-time approach in the analysis of momentum gradient descent with step size $\gamma$ and momentum parameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-11 Hristo Papazov , Scott Pesme , Nicolas Flammarion

A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Jichu Li , Xuan Tang , Difan Zou

Recently, there has been significant progress in understanding the convergence and generalization properties of gradient-based methods for training overparameterized learning models. However, many aspects including the role of small random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Dominik Stöger , Changzhi Xie

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-17 Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto

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 descent~(SGD) and its variants have been the dominating optimization methods in machine learning. Compared to SGD with small-batch training, SGD with large-batch training can better utilize the computational power of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-16 Shen-Yi Zhao , Chang-Wei Shi , Yin-Peng Xie , Wu-Jun Li

Stochastic gradient descent procedures have gained popularity for parameter estimation from large data sets. However, their statistical properties are not well understood, in theory. And in practice, avoiding numerical instability requires…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-09-29 Panos Toulis , Edoardo M. Airoldi

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibits strong algorithmic regularization effects in practice, which has been hypothesized to play an important role in the generalization of modern machine learning approaches. In this work, we seek to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Dean P. Foster , Sham M. Kakade

We study the implicit regularization imposed by gradient descent for learning multi-layer homogeneous functions including feed-forward fully connected and convolutional deep neural networks with linear, ReLU or Leaky ReLU activation. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Simon S. Du , Wei Hu , Jason D. Lee

Gradient Descent (GD) has been proven effective in solving various matrix factorization problems. However, its optimization behavior with large initial values remains less understood. To address this gap, this paper presents a novel…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-04 Hengchao Chen , Xin Chen , Mohamad Elmasri , Qiang Sun

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan

In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Ziming Zhang , Wenju Xu , Alan Sullivan

Many statistical estimators for high-dimensional linear regression are M-estimators, formed through minimizing a data-dependent square loss function plus a regularizer. This work considers a new class of estimators implicitly defined…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2022-02-15 Peng Zhao , Yun Yang , Qiao-Chu He

This paper studies the generalization performance of iterates obtained by Gradient Descent (GD), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and their proximal variants in high-dimensional robust regression problems. The number of features is…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-05 Kai Tan , Pierre C. Bellec