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Neural network compression has been an increasingly important subject, not only due to its practical relevance, but also due to its theoretical implications, as there is an explicit connection between compressibility and generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Yijun Wan , Melih Barsbey , Abdellatif Zaidi , Umut Simsekli

We develop a worst-case complexity theory for stochastically preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (SPSGD) and its accelerated variants under heavy-tailed noise, a setting that encompasses widely used adaptive methods such as Adam,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuchen Fang , James Demmel , Javad Lavaei

We investigate robust nonparametric regression in the presence of heavy-tailed noise, where the hypothesis class may contain unbounded functions and robustness is ensured via a robust loss function $\ell_\sigma$. Using Huber regression as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Yunlong Feng , Qiang Wu

Heavy-ball momentum with decaying learning rates is widely used with SGD for optimizing deep learning models. In contrast to its empirical popularity, the understanding of its theoretical property is still quite limited, especially under…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Rui Pan , Yuxing Liu , Xiaoyu Wang , Tong Zhang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient methods is a central problem in modern machine learning. Recent work has highlighted diagonal linear networks as a simplified yet expressive setting for analyzing the optimization and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Begoña García Malaxechebarría , Courtney Paquette , Maryam Fazel , Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy

The classical convergence analysis of SGD is carried out under the assumption that the norm of the stochastic gradient is uniformly bounded. While this might hold for some loss functions, it is violated for cases where the objective…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-12 Lam M. Nguyen , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Peter Richtárik , Katya Scheinberg , Martin Takáč , Marten van Dijk

In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Bodu Gong , Gustavo Enrique Batista , Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux

This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-19 Menglian Wang , Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its Ruppert-Polyak averaged variant (ASGD) lie at the heart of modern large-scale learning, yet their theoretical properties in high-dimensional settings are rarely understood. In this paper, we provide…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-15 Jiaqi Li , Zhipeng Lou , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber , Wei Biao Wu

We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Benjamin Dubois-Taine , Reza Babanezhad

We consider the task of heavy-tailed statistical estimation given streaming $p$-dimensional samples. This could also be viewed as stochastic optimization under heavy-tailed distributions, with an additional $O(p)$ space complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Che-Ping Tsai , Adarsh Prasad , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Pradeep Ravikumar

We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Kaiyuan Zhou , Xiaoyu Zhang , Wenyang Zhang , Di Wang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is the optimization algorithm of choice in many machine learning applications such as regularized empirical risk minimization and training deep neural networks. The classical convergence analysis of SGD is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-10 Lam M. Nguyen , Phuong Ha Nguyen , Marten van Dijk , Peter Richtárik , Katya Scheinberg , Martin Takáč

We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Zijian Liu , Jiawei Zhang , Zhengyuan Zhou

In Online Convex Optimization (OCO), when the stochastic gradient has a finite variance, many algorithms provably work and guarantee a sublinear regret. However, limited results are known if the gradient estimate has a heavy tail, i.e., the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zijian Liu

The empirical success of deep learning is often attributed to SGD's mysterious ability to avoid sharp local minima in the loss landscape, as sharp minima are known to lead to poor generalization. Recently, empirical evidence of heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Xingyu Wang , Sewoong Oh , Chang-Han Rhee

Gradient clipping is a standard safeguard for training neural networks under noisy, heavy-tailed stochastic gradients; yet, most clipping rules treat all parameters as vectors and ignore the matrix structure of modern architectures. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Alexander Yukhimchuk , Mladen Kolar , Martin Takáč , Sayantan Choudhury

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is still the \emph{de facto} algorithm in deep learning, adaptive methods like Clipped SGD/Adam have been observed to outperform SGD across important tasks, such as attention models. The settings…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-26 Jingzhao Zhang , Sai Praneeth Karimireddy , Andreas Veit , Seungyeon Kim , Sashank J Reddi , Sanjiv Kumar , Suvrit Sra

We consider a first order stochastic optimization framework where, at each iteration, $K$ independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) data point samples are drawn, based on which stochastic gradients can be queried. We allow gradient noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Manojlo Vukovic , Dusan Jakovetic