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In recent years, various notions of capacity and complexity have been proposed for characterizing the generalization properties of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in deep learning. Some of the popular notions that correlate well with the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli , Lingjiong Zhu

Recent theoretical studies have shown that heavy-tails can emerge in stochastic optimization due to `multiplicative noise', even under surprisingly simple settings, such as linear regression with Gaussian data. While these studies have…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-06 Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Yuanhan Hu , Umut Simsekli , Kun Yuan , Lingjiong Zhu

Recent studies have shown that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic optimization and that the heaviness of the tails have links to the generalization error. While these studies have shed light on interesting aspects of the generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-14 Anant Raj , Melih Barsbey , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Hongjian Wang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

Neural network compression techniques have become increasingly popular as they can drastically reduce the storage and computation requirements for very large networks. Recent empirical studies have illustrated that even simple pruning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-08 Melih Barsbey , Milad Sefidgaran , Murat A. Erdogdu , Gaël Richard , Umut Şimşekli

In recent works on the theory of machine learning, it has been observed that heavy tail properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) can be studied in the probabilistic framework of stochastic recursions. In particular,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-22 Ewa Damek , Sebastian Mentemeier

The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm. While many works provide high-probability guarantees, quantifying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajović , Dušan Jakovetić , Soummya Kar , Ali H. Sayed

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

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

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun

Heavy-tail phenomena in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been reported in several empirical studies. Experimental evidence in previous works suggests a strong interplay between the heaviness of the tails and generalization behavior of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Anant Raj , Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli

We introduce a general framework for nonlinear stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the scenarios when gradient noise exhibits heavy tails. The proposed framework subsumes several popular nonlinearity choices, like clipped, normalized,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-07 Dusan Jakovetic , Dragana Bajovic , Anit Kumar Sahu , Soummya Kar , Nemanja Milosevic , Dusan Stamenkovic

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

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

A recent line of empirical studies has demonstrated that SGD might exhibit a heavy-tailed behavior in practical settings, and the heaviness of the tails might correlate with the overall performance. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Krunoslav Lehman Pavasovic , Alain Durmus , Umut Simsekli

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-24 Thanh Huy Nguyen , Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Gaël Richard

While stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the major workhorses in machine learning, the learning properties of many practically used variants are poorly understood. In this paper, we consider least squares learning in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-28 Nicole Mücke , Gergely Neu , Lorenzo Rosasco

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 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
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