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Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-08 David Newton , Raghu Bollapragada , Raghu Pasupathy , Nung Kwan Yip

This paper is concerned about a learning algorithm for a probabilistic model of spiking neural networks (SNNs). Jimenez Rezende & Gerstner (2014) proposed a stochastic variational inference algorithm to train SNNs with hidden neurons. The…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-04 Hiroshi Kajino

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-20 Lin Xiao , Tong Zhang

We study stochastic gradient descent for solving conditional stochastic optimization problems, in which an objective to be minimized is given by a parametric nested expectation with an outer expectation taken with respect to one random…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-04-28 Takashi Goda , Wataru Kitade

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-14 Yadong Mu , Wei Liu , Wei Fan

Estimating the score, i.e., the gradient of log density function, from a set of samples generated by an unknown distribution is a fundamental task in inference and learning of probabilistic models that involve flexible yet intractable…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-01 Yuhao Zhou , Jiaxin Shi , Jun Zhu

We introduce a theoretical and practical framework for efficient importance sampling of mini-batch samples for gradient estimation from single and multiple probability distributions. To handle noisy gradients, our framework dynamically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Corentin Salaün , Xingchang Huang , Iliyan Georgiev , Niloy J. Mitra , Gurprit Singh

This paper investigates asymptotic behaviors of gradient descent algorithms (particularly accelerated gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent) in the context of stochastic optimization arising in statistics and machine learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-13 Yazhen Wang

Online averaged stochastic gradient algorithms are more and more studied since (i) they can deal quickly with large sample taking values in high dimensional spaces, (ii) they enable to treat data sequentially, (iii) they are known to be…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Antoine Godichon-Baggioni

The adjoint sensitivity method scalably computes gradients of solutions to ordinary differential equations. We generalize this method to stochastic differential equations, allowing time-efficient and constant-memory computation of gradients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Xuechen Li , Ting-Kam Leonard Wong , Ricky T. Q. Chen , David Duvenaud

In this paper we introduce a family of stochastic gradient estimation techniques based of the perturbative expansion around the mean of the sampling distribution. We characterize the bias and variance of the resulting Taylor-corrected…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-11-18 Luca Ambrogioni , Marcel A. J. van Gerven

Large language model (LLM) training is often bottlenecked by memory constraints and stochastic gradient noise in extremely high-dimensional parameter spaces. Motivated by empirical evidence that many LLM gradient matrices are effectively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Zehao Li , Tao Ren , Zishi Zhang , Xi Chen , Yijie Peng

We introduce a lattice random walk discretisation scheme for stochastic differential equations (SDEs) that samples binary or ternary increments at each step, suppressing complex drift and diffusion computations to simple 1 or 2 bit random…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-18 Samuel Duffield , Maxwell Aifer , Denis Melanson , Zach Belateche , Patrick J. Coles

Stochastic gradient methods for machine learning and optimization problems are usually analyzed assuming data points are sampled \emph{with} replacement. In practice, however, sampling \emph{without} replacement is very common, easier to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-10-18 Ohad Shamir

We consider an unconstrained problem of minimizing a smooth convex function which is only available through noisy observations of its values, the noise consisting of two parts. Similar to stochastic optimization problems, the first part is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-09-22 Eduard Gorbunov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

We analyze a batched variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with weighted sampling distribution for smooth and non-smooth objective functions. We show that by distributing the batches computationally, a significant speedup in the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2017-03-02 Deanna Needell , Rachel Ward

Stochastic gradient methods are central to large-scale learning, but they treat mini-batch gradients as unbiased estimators, which classical decision theory shows are inadmissible in high dimensions. We formulate gradient computation as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 M. Arashi , M. Amintoosi

Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-19 Qiyang Han , Xiaocong Xu

Gradient Smoothing is an efficient approach to reducing noise in gradient-based model explanation method. SmoothGrad adds Gaussian noise to mitigate much of these noise. However, the crucial hyper-parameter in this method, the variance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Linjiang Zhou , Chao Ma , Zepeng Wang , Libing Wu , Xiaochuan Shi

This paper proposes a distributed stochastic projection-free algorithm for large-scale constrained finite-sum optimization whose constraint set is complicated such that the projection onto the constraint set can be expensive. The global…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-25 Xia Jiang , Xianlin Zeng , Lihua Xie , Jian Sun , Jie Chen