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Recent research has observed that in machine learning optimization, gradient descent (GD) often operates at the edge of stability (EoS) [Cohen, et al., 2021], where the stepsizes are set to be large, resulting in non-monotonic losses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Jingfeng Wu , Vladimir Braverman , Jason D. Lee

Local SGD is a popular optimization method in distributed learning, often outperforming other algorithms in practice, including mini-batch SGD. Despite this success, theoretically proving the dominance of local SGD in settings with…

Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Sacchit Kale , Piyushi Manupriya , Pierre Marion , Francis Bach , Anant Raj

We consider distributed learning using constant stepsize SGD (DSGD) over several devices, each sending a final model update to a central server. In a final step, the local estimates are aggregated. We prove in the setting of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-24 Mike Nguyen , Charly Kirst , Nicole Mücke

This work establishes new convergence guarantees for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-06 Benjamin Grimmer

Pre-training Transformer models is resource-intensive, and recent studies have shown that sign momentum is an efficient technique for training large-scale deep learning models, particularly Transformers. However, its application in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Shuhua Yu , Ding Zhou , Cong Xie , An Xu , Zhi Zhang , Xin Liu , Soummya Kar

There has been a growing effort in studying the distributed optimization problem over a network. The objective is to optimize a global function formed by a sum of local functions, using only local computation and communication. Literature…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-02 Guannan Qu , Na Li

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

In this paper, we establish new convergence results for the quantized distributed gradient descent and suggest a novel strategy of choosing the stepsizes for the high-performance of the algorithm. Under the strongly convexity assumption on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Woocheol Choi , Myeong-Su Lee

In this thesis, we propose new theoretical frameworks for the analysis of stochastic and distributed methods with error compensation and local updates. Using these frameworks, we develop more than 20 new optimization methods, including the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-21 Eduard Gorbunov

This thesis contributes to the theoretical understanding of local update algorithms, especially Local SGD, in distributed and federated optimization under realistic models of data heterogeneity. A central focus is on the bounded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Kumar Kshitij Patel

Local SGD is a promising approach to overcome the communication overhead in distributed learning by reducing the synchronization frequency among worker nodes. Despite the recent theoretical advances of local SGD in empirical risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Yuyang Deng , Mehrdad Mahdavi

This paper considers a distributed stochastic strongly convex optimization, where agents connected over a network aim to cooperatively minimize the average of all agents' local cost functions. Due to the stochasticity of gradient estimation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-17 Jinlong Lei , Peng Yi , Jie Chen , Yiguang Hong

Recently Grimmer [1] showed for smooth convex optimization by utilizing longer steps periodically, gradient descent's textbook $LD^2/2T$ convergence guarantees can be improved by constant factors, conjecturing an accelerated rate strictly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-28 Benjamin Grimmer , Kevin Shu , Alex L. Wang

Local stochastic gradient descent (Local-SGD), also referred to as federated averaging, is an approach to distributed optimization where each device performs more than one SGD update per communication. This work presents an empirical study…

We analyze Local SGD (aka parallel or federated SGD) and Minibatch SGD in the heterogeneous distributed setting, where each machine has access to stochastic gradient estimates for a different, machine-specific, convex objective; the goal is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-02 Blake Woodworth , Kumar Kshitij Patel , Nathan Srebro

In federated distributed learning, the goal is to optimize a global training objective defined over distributed devices, where the data shard at each device is sampled from a possibly different distribution (a.k.a., heterogeneous or non…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-10 Farzin Haddadpour , Mehrdad Mahdavi

This paper considers a distributed stochastic non-convex optimization problem, where the nodes in a network cooperatively minimize a sum of $L$-smooth local cost functions with sparse gradients. By adaptively adjusting the stepsizes…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-01 Dongyu Han , Kun Liu , Yeming Lin , Yuanqing Xia

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Lei Qin , Michael Cantoni , Ye Pu

Distributed parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithms are workhorses for large scale machine learning tasks. Among them, local stochastic gradient descent (Local SGD) has attracted significant attention due to its low communication…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Shuheng Shen , Yifei Cheng , Jingchang Liu , Linli Xu