English
Related papers

Related papers: Distributed Stochastic Optimization under Heavy-Ta…

200 papers

Recent empirical evidence indicates that many machine learning applications involve heavy-tailed gradient noise, which challenges the standard assumptions of bounded variance in stochastic optimization. Gradient clipping has emerged as a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-10 Florian Hübler , Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

In this paper, we consider the unconstrained distributed optimization problem, in which the exchange of information in the network is captured by a directed graph topology, thus, nodes can only communicate with their neighbors.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-12-07 Apostolos I. Rikos , Wei Jiang , Themistoklis Charalambous , Karl H. Johansson

Recent works have proposed incorporating heavy-tailed (HT) noise into diffusion- and flow-based generative models, with the goals of better recovering the tails of target distributions and improving generative diversity. This motivation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Hamza Cherkaoui , Hélène Halconruy , Antonio Ocello

We study the problem of distributed zero-order optimization for a class of strongly convex functions. They are formed by the average of local objectives, associated to different nodes in a prescribed network of connections. We propose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-29 Arya Akhavan , Massimiliano Pontil , Alexandre B. Tsybakov

In this paper, a gradient-free distributed algorithm is introduced to solve a set constrained optimization problem under a directed communication network. Specifically, at each time-step, the agents locally compute a so-called…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-06 Yipeng Pang , Guoqiang Hu

This paper proposes a multi-scale method to design a continuous-time distributed algorithm for constrained convex optimization problems by using multi-agents with Markov switched network dynamics and noisy inter-agent communications. Unlike…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-02 Wei Ni , Xiaoli Wang

In this paper, we characterize the noise of stochastic gradients and analyze the noise-induced dynamics during training deep neural networks by gradient-based optimizers. Specifically, we firstly show that the stochastic gradient noise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-22 Yixin Wu , Rui Luo , Chen Zhang , Jun Wang , Yaodong Yang

We study convex optimization problems under differential privacy (DP). With heavy-tailed gradients, existing works achieve suboptimal rates. The main obstacle is that existing gradient estimators have suboptimal tail properties, resulting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Puning Zhao , Jiafei Wu , Zhe Liu , Chong Wang , Rongfei Fan , Qingming Li

In this work, we consider the problem of a network of agents collectively minimizing a sum of convex functions. The agents in our setting can only access their local objective functions and exchange information with their immediate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-01 Charikleia Iakovidou , Ermin Wei

While the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient methods are well understood \emph{in expectation}, there still exist many gaps in the understanding of their convergence with \emph{high probability}, where the convergence rate has a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-04 Ta Duy Nguyen , Thien Hang Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy Le Nguyen

A wider selection of step sizes is explored for the distributed subgradient algorithm for multi-agent optimization problems, for both time-invariant and time-varying communication topologies. The square summable requirement of the step…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-02 Peng Wang , Wei Ren

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

This paper considers optimization problems over networks where agents have individual objectives to meet, or individual parameter vectors to estimate, subject to subspace constraints that require the objectives across the network to lie in…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Roula Nassif , Stefan Vlaski , Ali H. Sayed

We consider stochastic optimization with delayed gradients where, at each time step $t$, the algorithm makes an update using a stale stochastic gradient from step $t - d_t$ for some arbitrary delay $d_t$. This setting abstracts asynchronous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-16 Alon Cohen , Amit Daniely , Yoel Drori , Tomer Koren , Mariano Schain

Heavy-tailed noise has attracted growing attention in nonconvex stochastic optimization, as numerous empirical studies suggest it offers a more realistic assumption than standard bounded variance assumption. In this work, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Xinwen Zhang , Hongchang Gao

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

The paper considers distributed stochastic optimization over randomly switching networks, where agents collaboratively minimize the average of all agents' local expectation-valued convex cost functions. Due to the stochasticity in gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-07 Jinlong Lei , Peng Yi , Jie Chen , Yiguang Hong

Distributed aggregative optimization underpins many cooperative optimization and multi-agent control systems, where each agent's objective function depends both on its local optimization variable and an aggregate of all agents' optimization…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-30 Ziqin Chen , Yongqiang Wang

Reaching agreement despite noise in communication is a fundamental problem in multi-agent systems. Here we study this problem under an idealized model, where it is assumed that agents can sense the general tendency in the system. More…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-09 Amos Korman , Robin Vacus

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