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This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-19 Menglian Wang , Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

Gradient clipping is a standard training technique used in deep learning applications such as large-scale language modeling to mitigate exploding gradients. Recent experimental studies have demonstrated a fairly special behavior in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Amirhossein Reisizadeh , Haochuan Li , Subhro Das , Ali Jadbabaie

High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

This paper studies the distributed optimization problem under the influence of heavy-tailed gradient noises. Here, a heavy-tailed noise means that the noise does not necessarily satisfy the bounded variance assumption. Instead, it satisfies…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-12 Chao Sun , Huiming Zhang , Bo Chen , Li Yu

We present two easy-to-implement gradient-free/zeroth-order methods to optimize a stochastic non-smooth function accessible only via a black-box. The methods are built upon efficient first-order methods in the heavy-tailed case, i.e., when…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-25 Nikita Kornilov , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Darina Dvinskikh

In this work, we describe a generic approach to show convergence with high probability for both stochastic convex and non-convex optimization with sub-Gaussian noise. In previous works for convex optimization, either the convergence is only…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-01 Zijian Liu , Ta Duy Nguyen , Thien Hang Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy Lê Nguyen

An increasing number of studies have focused on stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) under heavy-tailed gradient noises, which have been observed in the training of practical deep learning models. In this paper, we focus on two types of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-07-18 Tianxi Zhu , Yi Xu , Xiangyang Ji

We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta

In this study, we revisit the convergence of AdaGrad with momentum (covering AdaGrad as a special case) on non-convex smooth optimization problems. We consider a general noise model where the noise magnitude is controlled by the function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-16 Yusu Hong , Junhong Lin

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Alexander Rakhlin , Ohad Shamir , Karthik Sridharan

We study the distributed stochastic optimization (DSO) problem under a heavy-tailed noise condition by utilizing a multi-agent system. Despite the extensive research on DSO algorithms used to solve DSO problems under light-tailed noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Zhan Yu , Lan Liao , Deming Yuan , Daniel W. C. Ho , Ding-Xuan Zhou

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Melinda Hagedorn , Florian Jarre

Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , David Dobre , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Gauthier Gidel

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

We study convergence in high-probability of SGD-type methods in non-convex optimization and the presence of heavy-tailed noise. To combat the heavy-tailed noise, a general black-box nonlinear framework is considered, subsuming…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-11 Aleksandar Armacki , Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

Gradient clipping is a fundamental tool in Deep Learning, improving the high-probability convergence of stochastic first-order methods like SGD, AdaGrad, and Adam under heavy-tailed noise, which is common in training large language models.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Saleh Vatan Khah , Savelii Chezhegov , Shahrokh Farahmand , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

Stochastic optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning. Recent research has extended the study of stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) from light-tailed to heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in practice, with clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chuan He

In this paper, we consider non-smooth convex optimization with a zeroth-order oracle corrupted by symmetric stochastic noise. Unlike the existing high-probability results requiring the noise to have bounded $\kappa$-th moment with $\kappa…

We study stochastic convex optimization under infinite noise variance. Specifically, when the stochastic gradient is unbiased and has uniformly bounded $(1+\kappa)$-th moment, for some $\kappa \in (0,1]$, we quantify the convergence rate of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-24 Nuri Mert Vural , Lu Yu , Krishnakumar Balasubramanian , Stanislav Volgushev , Murat A. Erdogdu