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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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yuchen Fang , James Demmel , Javad Lavaei

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

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

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

Recent studies have provided both empirical and theoretical evidence illustrating that heavy tails can emerge in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in various scenarios. Such heavy tails potentially result in iterates with diverging…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-23 Hongjian Wang , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Lingjiong Zhu , Umut Şimşekli , Murat A. Erdogdu

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Peter Richtárik , Ilyas Fatkhullin

In this paper we study stochastic quasi-Newton methods for nonconvex stochastic optimization, where we assume that noisy information about the gradients of the objective function is available via a stochastic first-order oracle (SFO). We…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-05-23 Xiao Wang , Shiqian Ma , Donald Goldfarb , Wei Liu

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-10-29 Aniket Das , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Soumyabrata Pal , Arun Suggala , Prateek Varshney

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-11 Manojlo Vukovic , Dusan Jakovetic

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

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

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

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

Constrained optimization problems where both the objective and constraints may be nonsmooth and nonconvex arise across many learning and data science settings. In this paper, we show for any Lipschitz, weakly convex objectives and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-17 Zhichao Jia , Benjamin Grimmer

Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinwen Zhang , Yihan Zhang , Heng Liang , Hongchang Gao

Stochastic gradient descent with momentum (SGDm) is one of the most popular optimization algorithms in deep learning. While there is a rich theory of SGDm for convex problems, the theory is considerably less developed in the context of deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-05 Umut Şimşekli , Lingjiong Zhu , Yee Whye Teh , Mert Gürbüzbalaban

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-05 Ta Duy Nguyen , Alina Ene , Huy L. Nguyen

We consider a class of nonsmooth optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold, in which the objective function is weakly convex in the ambient Euclidean space. Such problems are ubiquitous in engineering applications but still largely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-26 Xiao Li , Shixiang Chen , Zengde Deng , Qing Qu , Zhihui Zhu , Anthony Man Cho So

In this paper we consider stochastic composite convex optimization problems with the objective function satisfying a stochastic bounded gradient condition, with or without a quadratic functional growth property. These models include the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-10 Ion Necoara

In the past several years, the last-iterate convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm has triggered people's interest due to its good performance in practice but lack of theoretical understanding. For Lipschitz convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Zijian Liu , Zhengyuan Zhou