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Machine learning has made tremendous progress in recent years, with models matching or even surpassing humans on a series of specialized tasks. One key element behind the progress of machine learning in recent years has been the ability to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Giorgi Nadiradze , Ilia Markov , Bapi Chatterjee , Vyacheslav Kungurtsev , Dan Alistarh

We study the learning dynamics of a multi-pass, mini-batch Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) procedure for empirical risk minimization in high-dimensional multi-index models with isotropic random data. In an asymptotic regime where the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-19 Zhou Fan , Leda Wang

We study gradient descent (GD) dynamics on logistic regression problems with large, constant step sizes. For linearly-separable data, it is known that GD converges to the minimizer with arbitrarily large step sizes, a property which no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Si Yi Meng , Antonio Orvieto , Daniel Yiming Cao , Christopher De Sa

This paper revisits the convergence of Stochastic Mirror Descent (SMD) in the contemporary nonconvex optimization setting. Existing results for batch-free nonconvex SMD restrict the choice of the distance generating function (DGF) to be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-28 Ilyas Fatkhullin , Niao He

We examine the relationship between the mutual information between the output model and the empirical sample and the generalization of the algorithm in the context of stochastic convex optimization. Despite increasing interest in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Roi Livni

While momentum-based methods, in conjunction with 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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-27 Ali Ramezani-Kebrya , Ashish Khisti , Ben Liang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-06-23 Gerard Ben Arous , Reza Gheissari , Aukosh Jagannath

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

Many modern large-scale machine learning problems benefit from decentralized and stochastic optimization. Recent works have shown that utilizing both decentralized computing and local stochastic gradient estimates can outperform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-11-06 Haoran Sun , Songtao Lu , Mingyi Hong

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-29 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

Recent advances in the theoretical understanding of SGD led to a formula for the optimal batch size minimizing the number of effective data passes, i.e., the number of iterations times the batch size. However, this formula is of no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-22 Motasem Alfarra , Slavomir Hanzely , Alyazeed Albasyoni , Bernard Ghanem , Peter Richtarik

The generalization mystery of overparametrized deep nets has motivated efforts to understand how gradient descent (GD) converges to low-loss solutions that generalize well. Real-life neural networks are initialized from small random values…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Kaifeng Lyu , Zhiyuan Li , Runzhe Wang , Sanjeev Arora

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-30 Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Zhenxun Zhuang , Ashok Cutkosky , Francesco Orabona

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

We study the problem of learning general (i.e., not necessarily homogeneous) halfspaces with Random Classification Noise under the Gaussian distribution. We establish nearly-matching algorithmic and Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Ilias Diakonikolas , Jelena Diakonikolas , Daniel M. Kane , Puqian Wang , Nikos Zarifis

Accelerated stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a workhorse in deep learning and often achieves better generalization performance than SGD. However, existing optimization theory can only explain the faster convergence of ASGD, but cannot…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Xuheng Li , Yihe Deng , Jingfeng Wu , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu