Related papers: Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization under Heavy-Tail…
In Online Convex Optimization (OCO), when the stochastic gradient has a finite variance, many algorithms provably work and guarantee a sublinear regret. However, limited results are known if the gradient estimate has a heavy tail, i.e., the…
We consider the stochastic optimization problem with smooth but not necessarily convex objectives in the heavy-tailed noise regime, where the stochastic gradient's noise is assumed to have bounded $p$th moment ($p\in(1,2]$). Zhang et al.…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
We study convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex function whose subgradients are estimated under heavy-tailed noise. Existing work often employs…
We develop a worst-case complexity theory for stochastically preconditioned stochastic gradient descent (SPSGD) and its accelerated variants under heavy-tailed noise, a setting that encompasses widely used adaptive methods such as Adam,…
In this work, we study the convergence \emph{in high probability} of clipped gradient methods when the noise distribution has heavy tails, ie., with bounded $p$th moments, for some $1<p\le2$. Prior works in this setting follow the same…
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior that emerged…
We study high-probability convergence guarantees of learning on streaming data in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In the proposed scenario, the model is updated in an online fashion, as new information is observed, without storing any…
Heavy-tailed noise is pervasive in modern machine learning applications, arising from data heterogeneity, outliers, and non-stationary stochastic environments. While second-order methods can significantly accelerate convergence in…
We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…
We study high-probability convergence in online learning, in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy tails, a general framework of nonlinear SGD methods is considered, subsuming several popular nonlinearities like sign,…
This paper considers the smooth bilevel optimization in which the lower-level problem is strongly convex and the upper-level problem is possibly nonconvex. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access the unbiased…
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…
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…
The empirical evidence indicates that stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise is more appropriate to characterize the training of machine learning models than that with standard bounded gradient variance noise. Most…
In this paper, the problem of distributed optimization is studied via a network of agents. Each agent only has access to a noisy gradient of its own objective function, and can communicate with its neighbors via a network. To handle this…
Classical analysis of convex and non-convex optimization methods often requires the Lipshitzness of the gradient, which limits the analysis to functions bounded by quadratics. Recent work relaxed this requirement to a non-uniform smoothness…
Motivated by understanding and analysis of large-scale machine learning under heavy-tailed gradient noise, we study decentralized optimization with gradient clipping, i.e., in which certain clipping operators are applied to the gradients or…
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,…
Methods with adaptive stepsizes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, are essential for training modern Deep Learning models, especially Large Language Models. Typically, the noise in the stochastic gradients is heavy-tailed for the later ones.…