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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-17 Sobihan Surendran , Antoine Godichon-Baggioni , Adeline Fermanian , Sylvain Le Corff

We introduce a novel and efficient algorithm called the stochastic approximate gradient descent (SAGD), as an alternative to the stochastic gradient descent for cases where unbiased stochastic gradients cannot be trivially obtained.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-14 Yixuan Qiu , Xiao Wang

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

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the stochastic heavy ball method (SHB, otherwise known as the momentum method) for the general stochastic approximation problem. For SGD, in the convex and smooth setting, we provide the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Othmane Sebbouh , Robert M. Gower , Aaron Defazio

In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

In this paper, we provide some analysis on the asymptotic escape of strict saddles in manifold optimization using the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm. One of our main contributions is that we extend the current analysis to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Thomas Y. Hou , Zhenzhen Li , Ziyun Zhang

Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Xi He , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Martin Takáč

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Saddle points constitute a crucial challenge for first-order gradient descent algorithms. In notions of classical machine learning, they are avoided for example by means of stochastic gradient descent methods. In this work, we provide…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-26 Junyu Liu , Frederik Wilde , Antonio Anna Mele , Xin Jin , Liang Jiang , Jens Eisert

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-18 Ruinan Jin , Difei Cheng , Hong Qiao , Xin Shi , Shaodong Liu , Bo Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 Jie Chen , Ronny Luss

Recent empirical evidence indicates that many machine learning applications involve heavy-tailed gradient noise, which challenges the standard assumptions of bounded variance in stochastic optimization. Gradient clipping has emerged as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-10 Florian Hübler , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Ruichen Jiang , Devyani Maladkar , Aryan Mokhtari

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

In non-smooth stochastic optimization, we establish the non-convergence of the stochastic subgradient descent (SGD) to the critical points recently called active strict saddles by Davis and Drusvyatskiy. Such points lie on a manifold $M$…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-26 Pascal Bianchi , Walid Hachem , Sholom Schechtman

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

In this paper, we provide a theoretical study of noise geometry for minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a phenomenon where noise aligns favorably with the geometry of local landscape. We propose two metrics, derived from analyzing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Mingze Wang , Lei Wu

We examine the behavior of accelerated gradient methods in smooth nonconvex unconstrained optimization, focusing in particular on their behavior near strict saddle points. Accelerated methods are iterative methods that typically step along…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-09 Michael O'Neill , Stephen J. Wright

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jun-Kun Wang , Chi-Heng Lin , Jacob Abernethy

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