English
Related papers

Related papers: When and Why Momentum Accelerates SGD:An Empirical…

200 papers

Recent work suggests that (stochastic) gradient descent self-organizes near an instability boundary, shaping both optimization and the solutions found. Momentum and mini-batch gradients are widely used in practical deep learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Arseniy Andreyev , Advikar Ananthkumar , Marc Walden , Tomaso Poggio , Pierfrancesco Beneventano

While momentum-based accelerated variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

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

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) methods have become fundamental optimization tools in machine learning, combining the computational efficiency of stochastic gradients with the acceleration benefits of momentum. Despite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-02 Zimeng Wang , Alp Yurtsever

In this paper we study the problem of convergence and generalization error bound of stochastic momentum for deep learning from the perspective of regularization. To do so, we first interpret momentum as solving an $\ell_2$-regularized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Ziming Zhang , Wenju Xu , Alan Sullivan

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDM) is one of the most widely used optimization algorithms in machine learning. While optimization properties of SGDM have been extensively studied in the literature, it remains insufficiently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yunwen Lei , Zimeng Wang , Xiaoming Yuan

Asynchronous methods are widely used in deep learning, but have limited theoretical justification when applied to non-convex problems. We show that running stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in an asynchronous manner can be viewed as adding…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-28 Ioannis Mitliagkas , Ce Zhang , Stefan Hadjis , Christopher Ré

SGD with momentum is one of the key components for improving the performance of neural networks. For decentralized learning, a straightforward approach using momentum is Distributed SGD (DSGD) with momentum (DSGDm). However, DSGDm performs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Yuki Takezawa , Han Bao , Kenta Niwa , Ryoma Sato , Makoto Yamada

In this paper, we propose a novel accelerated stochastic gradient method with momentum, which momentum is the weighted average of previous gradients. The weights decays inverse proportionally with the iteration times. Stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-02 Liang Liu , Xiaopeng Luo

Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam), which combines Adaptive Learning Rate and Momentum, would be the most popular stochastic optimizer for accelerating the training of deep neural networks. However, it is empirically known that Adam often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Zeke Xie , Xinrui Wang , Huishuai Zhang , Issei Sato , Masashi Sugiyama

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

Heavy ball momentum is crucial in accelerating (stochastic) gradient-based optimization algorithms for machine learning. Existing heavy ball momentum is usually weighted by a uniform hyperparameter, which relies on excessive tuning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Tao Sun , Huaming Ling , Zuoqiang Shi , Dongsheng Li , Bao Wang

Adam is known to perform significantly better than Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in language models, a phenomenon for which a number of explanations have been proposed. In this work, we revisit this "optimizer gap" through a series of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Teodora Srećković , Jonas Geiping , Antonio Orvieto

This paper aims to clearly distinguish between Stochastic Gradient Descent with Momentum (SGDM) and Adam in terms of their convergence rates. We demonstrate that Adam achieves a faster convergence compared to SGDM under the condition of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Bohan Wang , Huishuai Zhang , Qi Meng , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Ming Ma , Wei Chen

Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Vincent-Daniel Yun

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its momentum variants (Polyak Heavy-Ball and Nesterov) for tracking time-varying optima under strong convexity and smoothness. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-20 Sharan Sahu , Cameron J. Hogan , Martin T. Wells

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods are prominent for training machine learning and deep learning models. The performance of these techniques depends on their hyperparameter tuning over time and varies for different models and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-22 Tomer Lancewicki , Selcuk Kopru

While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are widely used when training machine learning models, there is little theoretical understanding on the generalization error of such methods. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

Modern machine learning often requires training with large batch size, distributed data, and massively parallel compute hardware (like mobile and other edge devices or distributed data centers). Communication becomes a major bottleneck in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Ahmed Khaled , Satyen Kale , Arthur Douillard , Chi Jin , Rob Fergus , Manzil Zaheer

The performance of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) strongly depends on setting the batch size and learning rate to minimize the empirical loss in training the deep neural network. In this paper, we present theoretical analyses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Hikaru Umeda , Hideaki Iiduka