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Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , David Dobre , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Gauthier Gidel

We consider the problem of high-dimensional heavy-tailed statistical estimation in the streaming setting, which is much harder than the traditional batch setting due to memory constraints. We cast this problem as stochastic convex…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Aniket Das , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Soumyabrata Pal , Arun Suggala , Prateek Varshney

In this paper, we propose robust stochastic algorithms for solving convex compositional problems of the form $f(\E_\xi g(\cdot; \xi)) + r(\cdot)$ by establishing {\bf sub-Gaussian confidence bounds} under weak assumptions about the tails of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Yan Yan , Xin Man , Tianbao Yang

Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Shaojie Li , Yong Liu

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a fundamental iterative framework with broad applications in reinforcement learning and optimization. Classical analyses typically rely on martingale difference or Markov noise with bounded second moments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Siddharth Chandak , Anuj Yadav , Ayfer Ozgur , Nicholas Bambos

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 study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu

Methods with adaptive stepsizes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, are essential for training modern Deep Learning models, especially Large Language Models. Typically, the noise in the stochastic gradients is heavy-tailed for the later ones.…

Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-12 Liam Hodgkinson , Michael W. Mahoney

Understanding the generalization properties of optimization algorithms under heavy-tailed noise has gained growing attention. However, the existing theoretical results mainly focus on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the analysis of…

In this paper, we consider non-smooth convex optimization with a zeroth-order oracle corrupted by symmetric stochastic noise. Unlike the existing high-probability results requiring the noise to have bounded $\kappa$-th moment with $\kappa…

We initiate the study of stochastic optimization with oblivious noise, broadly generalizing the standard heavy-tailed noise setup. In our setting, in addition to random observation noise, the stochastic gradient may be subject to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Ilias Diakonikolas , Sushrut Karmalkar , Jongho Park , Christos Tzamos

This work provides the first finite-time convergence guarantees for linearly constrained stochastic bilevel optimization using only first-order methods, requiring solely gradient information without any Hessian computations or second-order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-11-18 Cac Phan , Kai Wang

We establish the O($\frac{1}{k}$) convergence rate for distributed stochastic gradient methods that operate over strongly convex costs and random networks. The considered class of methods is standard each node performs a weighted average of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-22 Dusan Jakovetic , Dragana Bajovic , Anit Kumar Sahu , Soummya Kar

We study large deviation upper bounds and mean-squared error (MSE) guarantees of a general framework of nonlinear stochastic gradient methods in the online setting, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. Unlike existing works that rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Aleksandar Armacki , Shuhua Yu , Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

Gradient clipping has long been considered essential for ensuring the convergence of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the presence of heavy-tailed gradient noise. In this paper, we revisit this belief and explore whether gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Tao Sun , Xinwang Liu , Kun Yuan

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

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

We propose dynamic sampled stochastic approximation (SA) methods for stochastic optimization with a heavy-tailed distribution (with finite 2nd moment). The objective is the sum of a smooth convex function with a convex regularizer.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-26 Alejandro Jofré , Philip Thompson