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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

This work focuses on the behavior of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in solving least-squares regression with physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). Past work on this topic has been based on the over-parameterization regime, whose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Zhihan Zeng , Yiqi Gu

One classical canon of statistics is that large models are prone to overfitting, and model selection procedures are necessary for high dimensional data. However, many overparameterized models, such as neural networks, perform very well in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-01-05 Xi Chen , Qiang Liu , Xin T. Tong

We study the generalization properties of the popular stochastic optimization method known as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for optimizing general non-convex loss functions. Our main contribution is providing upper bounds on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Gergely Neu , Gintare Karolina Dziugaite , Mahdi Haghifam , Daniel M. Roy

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

Machine learning has made tremendous progress in recent years, with models matching or even surpassing humans on a series of specialized tasks. One key element behind the progress of machine learning in recent years has been the ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Giorgi Nadiradze , Ilia Markov , Bapi Chatterjee , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Dan Alistarh

Neural networks trained with SGD were recently shown to rely preferentially on linearly-predictive features and can ignore complex, equally-predictive ones. This simplicity bias can explain their lack of robustness out of distribution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Damien Teney , Ehsan Abbasnejad , Simon Lucey , Anton van den Hengel

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method and its variants are algorithms of choice for many Deep Learning tasks. These methods operate in a small-batch regime wherein a fraction of the training data, say $32$-$512$ data points, is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-13 Nitish Shirish Keskar , Dheevatsa Mudigere , Jorge Nocedal , Mikhail Smelyanskiy , Ping Tak Peter Tang

Accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a workhorse in deep learning and often achieves better generalization performance than SGD. However, existing optimization theory can only explain the faster convergence of ASGD, but cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Xuheng Li , Yihe Deng , Jingfeng Wu , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a cornerstone algorithm for high-dimensional optimization, renowned for its empirical successes. Recent theoretical advances have provided a deep understanding of how SGD enables feature learning in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-23 Nived Rajaraman , Yanjun Han

Deep neural networks with remarkably strong generalization performances are usually over-parameterized. Despite explicit regularization strategies are used for practitioners to avoid over-fitting, the impacts are often small. Some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Deren Lei , Zichen Sun , Yijun Xiao , William Yang Wang

Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianneng Yu , Alexandre V. Morozov

The generalization performance of a machine learning algorithm such as a neural network depends in a non-trivial way on the structure of the data distribution. To analyze the influence of data structure on test loss dynamics, we study an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Blake Bordelon , Cengiz Pehlevan

In this work, we reveal a strong implicit bias of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) that drives overly expressive networks to much simpler subnetworks, thereby dramatically reducing the number of independent parameters, and improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Feng Chen , Daniel Kunin , Atsushi Yamamura , Surya Ganguli

We give a new separation result between the generalization performance of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and of full-batch gradient descent (GD) in the fundamental stochastic convex optimization model. While for SGD it is well-known that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-01 Idan Amir , Tomer Koren , Roi Livni

The largely successful method of training neural networks is to learn their weights using some variant of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Here, we show that the solutions found by SGD can be further improved by ensembling a subset of the…

We investigate the time complexity of SGD learning on fully-connected neural networks with isotropic data. We put forward a complexity measure -- the leap -- which measures how "hierarchical" target functions are. For $d$-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Emmanuel Abbe , Enric Boix-Adsera , Theodor Misiakiewicz

Learning in Deep Neural Networks (DNN) takes place by minimizing a non-convex high-dimensional loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strategy. The learning process is observed to be able to find good minimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-12 Carlo Baldassi , Fabrizio Pittorino , Riccardo Zecchina

We study the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a class of sequence models termed Sequence Single-Index (SSI) models, where the target depends on a single direction in input space applied to a sequence of tokens. This setting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-13 Luca Arnaboldi , Bruno Loureiro , Ludovic Stephan , Florent Krzakala , Lenka Zdeborova

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used techniques for online optimization in machine learning. In this work, we accelerate SGD by adaptively learning how to sample the most useful training examples at each time…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-16 Guillaume Bouchard , Théo Trouillon , Julien Perez , Adrien Gaidon