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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

We establish new theoretical convergence guarantees for the difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA), where the second function is allowed to be weakly-convex, measuring progress via composite gradient mapping. Based on a tight analysis of two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-23 Teodor Rotaru , Panagiotis Patrinos , François Glineur

Heavy-tail phenomena in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been reported in several empirical studies. Experimental evidence in previous works suggests a strong interplay between the heaviness of the tails and generalization behavior of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Anant Raj , Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli

We study the convergence dynamics of Gradient Descent (GD) in a minimal binary classification setting, consisting of a two-neuron ReLU network and two training instances. We prove that even under these strong simplifying assumptions, while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Guy Smorodinsky , Sveta Gimpleson , Itay Safran

We study $\textit{gradient descent}$ (GD) for logistic regression on linearly separable data with stepsizes that adapt to the current risk, scaled by a constant hyperparameter $\eta$. We show that after at most $1/\gamma^2$ burn-in steps,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-21 Ruiqi Zhang , Jingfeng Wu , Licong Lin , Peter L. Bartlett

In risk management, tail risks are of crucial importance. The quality of a tail model, which is determined by data from an unknown distribution, depends critically on the subset of data used to model the tail. Based on a suitably weighted…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-01-19 Ingo Hoffmann , Christoph J. Börner

The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing works based on stability have studied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-08 Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Huishuai Zhang

This paper establishes risk convergence and asymptotic weight matrix alignment --- a form of implicit regularization --- of gradient flow and gradient descent when applied to deep linear networks on linearly separable data. In more detail,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ziwei Ji , Matus Telgarsky

Regularization is a widely recognized technique in mathematical optimization. It can be used to smooth out objective functions, refine the feasible solution set, or prevent overfitting in machine learning models. Due to its simplicity and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-31 Filip Nikolovski , Irena Stojkovska , Katerina Hadzi-Velkova Saneva , Zoran Hadzi-Velkov

Modern supervised learning techniques, particularly those using deep nets, involve fitting high dimensional labelled data sets with functions containing very large numbers of parameters. Much of this work is empirical. Interesting phenomena…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-05-30 Partha P Mitra

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a promising numerical method for solving large-scale inverse problems. However, its theoretical properties remain largely underexplored in the lens of classical regularization theory. In this note, we…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Tim Jahn , Bangti Jin

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

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-15 Matthew J. Holland

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is perhaps the most prevalent optimization method in modern machine learning. Contrary to the empirical practice of sampling from the datasets without replacement and with (possible) reshuffling at each…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Xufeng Cai , Cheuk Yin Lin , Jelena Diakonikolas

Solving large tensor linear systems poses significant challenges due to the high volume of data stored, and it only becomes more challenging when some of the data is missing. Recently, Ma et al. showed that this problem can be tackled using…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-05-28 Anna Ma , Deanna Needell , Alexander Xue

There is an increasing realization that algorithmic inductive biases are central in preventing overfitting; empirically, we often see a benign overfitting phenomenon in overparameterized settings for natural learning algorithms, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-14 Difan Zou , Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu , Sham M. Kakade

Stochastic gradient descent in continuous time (SGDCT) provides a computationally efficient method for the statistical learning of continuous-time models, which are widely used in science, engineering, and finance. The SGDCT algorithm…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-06-18 Justin Sirignano , Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

Theoretically understanding stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized models has led to the development of several optimization algorithms that are widely used in practice today. Recent work by~\citet{zou2021benign} provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Alexandru Meterez , Depen Morwani , Costin-Andrei Oncescu , Jingfeng Wu , Cengiz Pehlevan , Sham Kakade

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-23 Gerard Ben Arous , Reza Gheissari , Aukosh Jagannath

$L_0$-smoothness, which has been pivotal to advancing decentralized optimization theory, is often fairly restrictive for modern tasks like deep learning. The recent advent of relaxed $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness condition enables improved…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-13 Zhanhong Jiang , Aditya Balu , Soumik Sarkar