English
Related papers

Related papers: From Mutual Information to Expected Dynamics: New …

200 papers

Training modern neural networks often relies on large learning rates, operating at the edge of stability, where the optimization dynamics exhibit oscillatory and chaotic behavior. Empirically, this regime often yields improved…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Mario Tuci , Caner Korkmaz , Umut Şimşekli , Tolga Birdal

We study the generalization properties of unregularized gradient methods applied to separable linear classification -- a setting that has received considerable attention since the pioneering work of Soudry et al. (2018). We establish tight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Matan Schliserman , Tomer Koren

Datasets with extreme observations and/or heavy-tailed error distributions are commonly encountered and should be analyzed with careful consideration of these features from a statistical perspective. Small deviations from an assumed model,…

Methodology · Statistics 2023-01-12 Meadhbh O'Neill , Kevin Burke

We consider stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data with the guarantee of being differentially private (DP). Most prior works on differentially private stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data are either restricted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chenhan Jin , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , James Cheng , Tieyong Zeng

Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Chi Jin , Praneeth Netrapalli , Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Michael I. Jordan

In this work, we present a variety of novel information-theoretic generalization bounds for learning algorithms, from the supersample setting of Steinke & Zakynthinou (2020)-the setting of the "conditional mutual information" framework. Our…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-16 Ziqiao Wang , Yongyi Mao

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- common in modern machine learning and reinforcement learning -- remains poorly understood. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-08 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Florian Hübler , Guanghui Lan

We consider a data-driven formulation of the classical discrete-time stochastic control problem. Our approach exploits the natural structure of many such problems, in which significant portions of the system are uncontrolled. Employing the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-25 Boris Baros , Samuel N. Cohen , Christoph Reisinger

The stochastic gradient noise (SGN) is a significant factor in the success of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Following the central limit theorem, SGN was initially modeled as Gaussian, and lately, it has been suggested that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Barak Battash , Ofir Lindenbaum

Generalization error bounds are essential to understanding machine learning algorithms. This paper presents novel expected generalization error upper bounds based on the average joint distribution between the output hypothesis and each…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Gholamali Aminian , Yuheng Bu , Gregory Wornell , Miguel Rodrigues

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

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

Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DPSGD) is widely utilized to preserve training data privacy in deep learning, which first clips the gradients to a predefined norm and then injects calibrated noise into the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Haichao Sha , Yang Cao , Yong Liu , Yuncheng Wu , Ruixuan Liu , Hong Chen

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is an out-of-equilibrium algorithm used extensively to train artificial neural networks. However very little is known on to what extent SGD is crucial for to the success of this technology and, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Persia Jana Kamali , Pierfrancesco Urbani

We showcase important features of the dynamics of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in the training of neural networks. We present empirical observations that commonly used large step sizes (i) lead the iterates to jump from one side of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Maksym Andriushchenko , Aditya Varre , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Nicolas Flammarion

Learning with a {\it convex loss} function has been a dominating paradigm for many years. It remains an interesting question how non-convex loss functions help improve the generalization of learning with broad applicability. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-22 Yi Xu , Shenghuo Zhu , Sen Yang , Chi Zhang , Rong Jin , Tianbao Yang

Real-world data is laden with outlying values. The challenge for machine learning is that the learner typically has no prior knowledge of whether the feedback it receives (losses, gradients, etc.) will be heavy-tailed or not. In this work,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-16 Matthew J. Holland

Gradient clipping is a fundamental tool in Deep Learning, improving the high-probability convergence of stochastic first-order methods like SGD, AdaGrad, and Adam under heavy-tailed noise, which is common in training large language models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Saleh Vatan Khah , Savelii Chezhegov , Shahrokh Farahmand , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

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

Score-based generative models (SGMs) have emerged as one of the most popular classes of generative models. A substantial body of work now exists on the analysis of SGMs, focusing either on discretization aspects or on their statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Benjamin Dupuis , Dario Shariatian , Maxime Haddouche , Alain Durmus , Umut Simsekli