English
Related papers

Related papers: Can SGD Handle Heavy-Tailed Noise?

200 papers

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-14 Kangqiao Liu , Liu Ziyin , Masahito Ueda

Recently, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants have become the dominant methods in the large-scale optimization of machine learning (ML) problems. A variety of strategies have been proposed for tuning the step sizes, ranging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Xiaoyu Li

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method is popular for solving non-convex optimization problems in machine learning. This work investigates SGD from a viewpoint of graduated optimization, which is a widely applied approach for non-convex…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-08-15 Da Li , Jingjing Wu , Qingrun Zhang

Classical stochastic gradient methods are well suited for minimizing expected-value objective functions. However, they do not apply to the minimization of a nonlinear function involving expected values or a composition of two expected-value…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2014-11-17 Mengdi Wang , Ethan X. Fang , Han Liu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning. Although being commonly viewed as a fast but not accurate version of gradient descent (GD), it always finds better solutions than GD for modern neural networks. In order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-17 Robert Kleinberg , Yuanzhi Li , Yang Yuan

We propose a projected semi-stochastic gradient descent method with mini-batch for improving both the theoretical complexity and practical performance of the general stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). We are able to prove linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-08 Jie Liu , Martin Takac

Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-26 Guannan Liang , Qianqian Tong , Chunjiang Zhu , Jinbo Bi

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun

Randomized subspace methods reduce per-iteration cost; however, in nonconvex optimization, most analyses are expectation-based, and high-probability bounds remain scarce even under sub-Gaussian noise. We first prove that randomized subspace…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-30 Gaku Omiya , Pierre-Louis Poirion , Akiko Takeda

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 analyze the variance of stochastic gradients along negative curvature directions in certain non-convex machine learning models and show that stochastic gradients exhibit a strong component along these directions. Furthermore, we show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Hadi Daneshmand , Jonas Kohler , Aurelien Lucchi , Thomas Hofmann

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a central tool in machine learning. We prove that SGD converges to zero loss, even with a fixed (non-vanishing) learning rate - in the special case of homogeneous linear classifiers with smooth monotone…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-19 Mor Shpigel Nacson , Nathan Srebro , Daniel Soudry

Adaptive gradient methods, such as AdaGrad, are among the most successful optimization algorithms for neural network training. While these methods are known to achieve better dimensional dependence than stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-09 Ruichen Jiang , Devyani Maladkar , Aryan Mokhtari

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most popular algorithms in modern machine learning. The noise encountered in these applications is different from that in many theoretical analyses of stochastic gradient algorithms. In this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Tuo Liu , El Mehdi Saad , Wojciech Kotłowski , Francesco Orabona

This paper studies a risk minimization problem with decision dependent data distribution. The problem pertains to the performative prediction setting in which a trained model can affect the outcome estimated by the model. Such dependency…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-01-07 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai

We consider stochastic convex optimization problems where the objective is an expectation over smooth functions. For this setting we suggest a novel gradient estimate that combines two recent mechanism that are related to notion of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Tehila Dahan , Kfir Y. Levy

In this paper, we first reinvestigate the convergence of vanilla SGD method in the sense of $L^2$ under more general learning rates conditions and a more general convex assumption, which relieves the conditions on learning rates and do not…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-06-12 Tiannan Xiao , Guoguo Yang