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We analyze (stochastic) gradient descent (SGD) with delayed updates on smooth quasi-convex and non-convex functions and derive concise, non-asymptotic, convergence rates. We show that the rate of convergence in all cases consists of two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-17 Sebastian U. Stich , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-03 Yi Zhou , Junjie Yang , Huishuai Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Vahid Tarokh

In this paper, we study the convergence properties of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method for finding a stationary point of a given objective function $J(\cdot)$. The objective function is not required to be convex. Rather, our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-09-24 Rajeeva L. Karandikar , M. Vidyasagar

We present backpropagation clipping, a novel variant of differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) for privacy-preserving deep learning. Our approach clips each trainable layer's inputs (during the forward pass) and its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Timothy Stevens , Ivoline C. Ngong , David Darais , Calvin Hirsch , David Slater , Joseph P. Near

Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-02-21 Sattar Vakili , Sudeep Salgia , Qing Zhao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Aaron Mishkin , Ahmed Khaled , Yuanhao Wang , Aaron Defazio , Robert M. Gower

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

Gradient perturbation, widely used for differentially private optimization, injects noise at every iterative update to guarantee differential privacy. Previous work first determines the noise level that can satisfy the privacy requirement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Da Yu , Huishuai Zhang , Wei Chen , Tie-Yan Liu , Jian Yin

Zeroth-order optimization aims to minimize an objective function using only function evaluations, and is therefore fundamental in black-box optimization, hyperparameter tuning, bandit learning, and adversarial machine learning. While…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Haishan Ye

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the main algorithm behind a large body of work in machine learning. In many cases, constraints are enforced via projections, leading to projected stochastic gradient algorithms. In recent years, a large…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Yuping Zheng , Andrew Lamperski

We consider distributed gradient descent in the presence of stragglers. Recent work on \em gradient coding \em and \em approximate gradient coding \em have shown how to add redundancy in distributed gradient descent to guarantee convergence…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Rawad Bitar , Mary Wootters , Salim El Rouayheb

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta

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

Convergence detection of iterative stochastic optimization methods is of great practical interest. This paper considers stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant learning rate and momentum. We show that there exists a transient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-28 Jerry Chee , Ping Li

We explore conditions for when the gradient of a deep declarative node can be approximated by ignoring constraint terms and still result in a descent direction for the global loss function. This has important practical application when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Stephen Gould , Ming Xu , Zhiwei Xu , Yanbin Liu

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Boao Kong , Hengrui Zhang , Kun Yuan

$L_0$-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