Related papers: Tight Risk Bounds for Gradient Descent on Separabl…

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…

We study a scalable alternative to robust gradient descent (RGD) techniques that can be used when the gradients can be heavy-tailed, though this will be unknown to the learner. The core technique is simple: instead of trying to robustly…

We provide sharp path-dependent generalization and excess risk guarantees for the full-batch Gradient Descent (GD) algorithm on smooth losses (possibly non-Lipschitz, possibly nonconvex). At the heart of our analysis is an upper bound on…

We study convex optimization problems under differential privacy (DP). With heavy-tailed gradients, existing works achieve suboptimal rates. The main obstacle is that existing gradient estimators have suboptimal tail properties, resulting…

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

The study of loss function distributions is critical to characterize a model's behaviour on a given machine learning problem. For example, while the quality of a model is commonly determined by the average loss assessed on a testing set,…

Gradient based optimization algorithms deployed in Machine Learning (ML) applications are often analyzed and compared by their convergence rates or regret bounds. While these rates and bounds convey valuable information they don't always…

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…

Exponential tail bounds for sums play an important role in statistics, but the example of the $t$-statistic shows that the exponential tail decay may be lost when population parameters need to be estimated from the data. However, it turns…

Understanding the generalization abilities of modern machine learning algorithms has been a major research topic over the past decades. In recent years, the learning dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) have been related to…

We study stochastic nonconvex optimization under heavy-tailed noise. In this setting, the stochastic gradients only have bounded $p$-th central moment ($p$-BCM) for some $p \in (1,2]$. Building on the foundational work of Arjevani et al.…

This paper proposes a novel proximal-gradient algorithm for a decentralized optimization problem with a composite objective containing smooth and non-smooth terms. Specifically, the smooth and nonsmooth terms are dealt with by gradient and…

We study the finite-time behaviour of the popular temporal difference (TD) learning algorithm when combined with tail-averaging. We derive finite time bounds on the parameter error of the tail-averaged TD iterate under a step-size choice…

We study high-probability convergence guarantees of learning on streaming data in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In the proposed scenario, the model is updated in an online fashion, as new information is observed, without storing any…

Fractional derivatives are a well-studied generalization of integer order derivatives. Naturally, for optimization, it is of interest to understand the convergence properties of gradient descent using fractional derivatives. Convergence…

A theoretical, and potentially also practical, problem with stochastic gradient descent is that trajectories may escape to infinity. In this note, we investigate uniform boundedness properties of iterates and function values along the…

In this paper we introduce a unified analysis of a large family of variants of proximal stochastic gradient descent ({\tt SGD}) which so far have required different intuitions, convergence analyses, have different applications, and which…

A recent line of research has shown that gradient-based algorithms with random initialization can converge to the global minima of the training loss for over-parameterized (i.e., sufficiently wide) deep neural networks. However, the…

We provide tight finite-time convergence bounds for gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent on quadratic functions, when the gradients are delayed and reflect iterates from $\tau$ rounds ago. First, we show that without stochastic…

The stability and generalization of stochastic gradient-based methods provide valuable insights into understanding the algorithmic performance of machine learning models. As the main workhorse for deep learning, stochastic gradient descent…