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Heavy-tailed stochastic gradient noise, commonly observed in transformer models, can destabilize the optimization process. Recent works mainly focus on developing and understanding approaches to address heavy-tailed noise in the centralized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Junfei Sun , Dixi Yao , Xuchen Gong , Tahseen Rabbani , Manzil Zaheer , Tian Li

We consider stochastic optimization problems with heavy-tailed noise with structured density. For such problems, we show that it is possible to get faster rates of convergence than $\mathcal{O}(K^{-2(\alpha - 1)/\alpha})$, when the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-18 Nikita Puchkin , Eduard Gorbunov , Nikolay Kutuzov , Alexander Gasnikov

We present an algorithm for distributed estimation of an unknown vector parameter $\boldsymbol{\theta}^\ast \in {\mathbb R}^M$ in the presence of heavy-tailed observation and communication noises. Heavy-tailed noises frequently appear,…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar , Manojlo Vukovic

In this paper, we provide novel optimal (or near optimal) convergence rates for a clipped version of the stochastic subgradient method. We consider nonsmooth convex problems over possibly unbounded domains, under heavy-tailed noise that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-21 Daniela Angela Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Saverio Salzo

In this work we study high probability bounds for stochastic subgradient methods under heavy tailed noise. In this setting the noise is only assumed to have finite variance as opposed to a sub-Gaussian distribution for which it is known…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-16 Daniela A. Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

Heavy-tailed noise has attracted growing attention in nonconvex stochastic optimization, as numerous empirical studies suggest it offers a more realistic assumption than standard bounded variance assumption. In this work, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Xinwen Zhang , Hongchang Gao

We consider the task of heavy-tailed statistical estimation given streaming $p$-dimensional samples. This could also be viewed as stochastic optimization under heavy-tailed distributions, with an additional $O(p)$ space complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Che-Ping Tsai , Adarsh Prasad , Sivaraman Balakrishnan , Pradeep Ravikumar

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-11-12 Shuhua Yu , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

While the convergence behaviors of stochastic gradient methods are well understood \emph{in expectation}, there still exist many gaps in the understanding of their convergence with \emph{high probability}, where the convergence rate has a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-04 Ta Duy Nguyen , Thien Hang Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy Le Nguyen

Distributed consensus optimization has received considerable attention in recent years; several distributed consensus-based algorithms have been proposed for (nonsmooth) convex and (smooth) nonconvex objective functions. However, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-05 Vyacheslav Kungurtsev

Heavy-tailed noise in nonconvex stochastic optimization has garnered increasing research interest, as empirical studies, including those on training attention models, suggest it is a more realistic gradient noise condition. This paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Shuhua Yu , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

Gradient clipping is a widely used technique in Machine Learning and Deep Learning (DL), known for its effectiveness in mitigating the impact of heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in the training of large language models.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Naoki Sato , Hideaki Iiduka

With the rapid development of distributed optimization (DO) theory, the distributed stochastic gradient methods (DSGMs) occupy an important position. Although the theory of different DSGMs has been widely established, the main-stream…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-24 Zhan Yu , Zhongjie Shi , Deming Yuan

In this paper, we propose robust stochastic algorithms for solving convex compositional problems of the form $f(\E_\xi g(\cdot; \xi)) + r(\cdot)$ by establishing {\bf sub-Gaussian confidence bounds} under weak assumptions about the tails of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-19 Yan Yan , Xin Man , Tianbao Yang

This paper studies distributed estimation and support recovery for high-dimensional linear regression model with heavy-tailed noise. To deal with heavy-tailed noise whose variance can be infinite, we adopt the quantile regression loss…

Methodology · Statistics 2020-09-21 Xi Chen , Weidong Liu , Xiaojun Mao , Zhuoyi Yang

Although stochastic optimization is central to modern machine learning, the precise mechanisms underlying its success, and in particular, the precise role of the stochasticity, still remain unclear. Modelling stochastic optimization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-12 Liam Hodgkinson , Michael W. Mahoney

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

We consider stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data with the guarantee of being differentially private (DP). Most prior works on differentially private stochastic convex optimization for heavy-tailed data are either restricted…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-11 Chenhan Jin , Kaiwen Zhou , Bo Han , James Cheng , Tieyong Zeng

Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Zijian Liu