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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

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm has been widely used in statistical estimation for large-scale data due to its computational and memory efficiency. While most existing works focus on the convergence of the objective function…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-11-02 Xi Chen , Jason D. Lee , Xin T. Tong , Yichen Zhang

The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

We analyze the dynamics of streaming stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in the high-dimensional limit when applied to generalized linear models and multi-index models (e.g. logistic regression, phase retrieval) with general data-covariance.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-21 Elizabeth Collins-Woodfin , Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Inbar Seroussi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is fundamental for training deep neural networks, especially in non-convex settings. Understanding SGD's generalization properties is crucial for ensuring robust model performance on unseen data. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-24 Wenjun Xiong , Juan Ding , Xinlei Zuo , Qizhai Li

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

Neural networks are usually trained by some form of stochastic gradient descent (SGD)). A number of strategies are in common use intended to improve SGD optimization, such as learning rate schedules, momentum, and batching. These are…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-08-13 Thomas M. Breuel

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is central to deep learning, yet the dynamical origin of its preference for flatter, more generalizable solutions remains unclear. Here, by analyzing SGD learning dynamics, we identify a nonequilibrium…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Ning Yang , Yikuan Zhang , Qi Ouyang , Chao Tang , Yuhai Tu

Explaining the generalization characteristics of deep learning is an emerging topic in advanced machine learning. There are several unanswered questions about how learning under stochastic optimization really works and why certain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Mahdi S. Hosseini , Mathieu Tuli , Konstantinos N. Plataniotis

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a key ingredient in the training of deep neural networks and yet its geometrical significance appears elusive. We study a deterministic model in which the trajectories of our dynamical systems are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-19 R. Fioresi , P. Chaudhari , S. Soatto

This manuscript investigates the one-pass stochastic gradient descent (SGD) dynamics of a two-layer neural network trained on Gaussian data and labels generated by a similar, though not necessarily identical, target function. We rigorously…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Luca Arnaboldi , Ludovic Stephan , Florent Krzakala , Bruno Loureiro

In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Nam H. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Jayant R. Kalagnanam , Katya Scheinberg

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is the most popular algorithm for training deep neural networks (DNNs). As larger networks and datasets cause longer training times, training on distributed systems is common and distributed SGD variants,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Kwangmin Yu , Thomas Flynn , Shinjae Yoo , Nicholas D'Imperio

Several works have aimed to explain why overparameterized neural networks generalize well when trained by Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The consensus explanation that has emerged credits the randomized nature of SGD for the bias of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Shengchao Liu , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Dimitris Achlioptas

One crucial factor behind the success of deep learning lies in the implicit bias induced by noise inherent in gradient-based training algorithms. Motivated by empirical observations that training with noisy labels improves model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Tongcheng Zhang , Zhanpeng Zhou , Mingze Wang , Andi Han , Wei Huang , Taiji Suzuki , Junchi Yan

Multi-epoch, small-batch, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has been the method of choice for learning with large over-parameterized models. A popular theory for explaining why SGD works well in practice is that the algorithm has an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Satyen Kale , Ayush Sekhari , Karthik Sridharan

We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Maksym Andriushchenko , Aditya Varre , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

There has been a recent surge of interest in understanding the convergence of gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in overparameterized neural networks. Most previous works assume that the training data is provided a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-05-04 Jiaming Xu , Hanjing Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Haiping Huang , Taro Toyoizumi