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Neural network optimization remains one of the most consequential yet poorly understood challenges in modern AI research, where improvements in training algorithms can lead to enhanced feature learning in foundation models,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ansh Nagwekar

We study the complexity of training neural network models with one hidden nonlinear activation layer and an output weighted sum layer. We analyze Gradient Descent applied to learning a bounded target function on $n$ real-valued inputs. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Santosh Vempala , John Wilmes

We propose graph-dependent implicit regularisation strategies for distributed stochastic subgradient descent (Distributed SGD) for convex problems in multi-agent learning. Under the standard assumptions of convexity, Lipschitz continuity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-20 Dominic Richards , Patrick Rebeschini

Graph neural networks (GNNs) model nonlinear representations in graph data with applications in distributed agent coordination, control, and planning among others. Current GNN architectures assume ideal scenarios and ignore link…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-09-01 Zhan Gao , Elvin Isufi , Alejandro Ribeiro

An important question in deep learning is how higher-order optimization methods affect generalization. In this work, we analyze a stochastic Gauss-Newton (SGN) method with Levenberg-Marquardt damping and mini-batch sampling for training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Semih Cayci

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

Recent works have shown that high probability metrics with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) exhibit informativeness and in some cases advantage over the commonly adopted mean-square error-based ones. In this work we provide a formal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

The use of low-bit quantization has emerged as an indispensable technique for enabling the efficient training of large-scale models. Despite its widespread empirical success, a rigorous theoretical understanding of its impact on learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-17 Dechen Zhang , Junwei Su , Difan Zou

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Difan Zou , Quanquan Gu

We study nonparametric regression by an over-parameterized two-layer neural network trained by gradient descent (GD) in this paper. We show that, if the neural network is trained by GD with early stopping, then the trained network renders a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-07 Yingzhen Yang , Ping Li

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) now acts as a fundamental part of optimization in current machine learning. Meanwhile, deep learning architectures have shown outstanding performance in a wide range of fields, such as natural language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Zhao Song , Song Yue

The increasing scale of data propels the popularity of leveraging parallelism to speed up the optimization. Minibatch stochastic gradient descent (minibatch SGD) and local SGD are two popular methods for parallel optimization. The existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yunwen Lei , Tao Sun , Mingrui Liu

In this work, we consider the optimization process of minibatch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a 2-layer neural network with data separated by a quadratic ground truth function. We prove that with data drawn from the $d$-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Margalit Glasgow

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are almost universally used to train neural networks and to fit a variety of other parametric models. An important hyperparameter in this context is the batch size, which determines how…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Stefan Perko

Motivated by broad applications in reinforcement learning and machine learning, this paper considers the popular stochastic gradient descent (SGD) when the gradients of the underlying objective function are sampled from Markov processes.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-02 Thinh T. Doan , Lam M. Nguyen , Nhan H. Pham , Justin Romberg

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

The ability of deep neural networks to generalise well even when they interpolate their training data has been explained using various "simplicity biases". These theories postulate that neural networks avoid overfitting by first learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-05-29 Maria Refinetti , Alessandro Ingrosso , Sebastian Goldt

The multinomial logistic regression (MLR) model is widely used in statistics and machine learning. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the most common approach for determining the parameters of a MLR model in big data scenarios. However,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-03 Borja Sánchez-López , Jesus Cerquides