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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a pillar of modern machine learning, serving as the go-to optimization algorithm for a diverse array of problems. While the empirical success of SGD is often attributed to its computational efficiency…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-16 Courtney Paquette , Elliot Paquette , Ben Adlam , Jeffrey Pennington

We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-4})$ upper bound of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Yoel Drori , Ohad Shamir

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a known stochastic iterative method popular for large-scale convex optimization problems due to its simple implementation and scalability. Some objectives, such as those found in complex-valued neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Natanael Alpay , Emeric Battaglia

We consider the optimization of a smooth and strongly convex objective using constant step-size stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study its properties through the prism of Markov chains. We show that, for unbiased gradient estimates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Ibrahim Merad , Stéphane Gaïffas

The success of the Adam optimizer on a wide array of architectures has made it the default in settings where stochastic gradient descent (SGD) performs poorly. However, our theoretical understanding of this discrepancy is lagging,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Frederik Kunstner , Jacques Chen , Jonathan Wilder Lavington , Mark Schmidt

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithms are key ingredients in a series of machine learning applications. In this article we perform a rigorous strong error analysis for SGD optimization algorithms. In particular, we prove…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-10-05 Arnulf Jentzen , Benno Kuckuck , Ariel Neufeld , Philippe von Wurstemberger

The phenomenon that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) favors flat minima has played a critical role in understanding the implicit regularization of SGD. In this paper, we provide an explanation of this striking phenomenon by relating the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-18 Lei Wu , Mingze Wang , Weijie Su

In this paper, we consider a general stochastic optimization problem which is often at the core of supervised learning, such as deep learning and linear classification. We consider a standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method with a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Nam H. Nguyen , Dzung T. Phan , Jayant R. Kalagnanam , Katya Scheinberg

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a widely used algorithm in machine learning, particularly for neural network training. Recent studies on SGD for canonical quadratic optimization or linear regression show it attains well generalization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Haihan Zhang , Yuanshi Liu , Qianwen Chen , Cong Fang

In the era of large-scale neural network models, optimization algorithms often struggle with generalization due to an overreliance on training loss. One key insight widely accepted in the machine learning community is the idea that wide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Bodu Gong , Gustavo Enrique Batista , Pierre Lafaye de Micheaux

In existing distributed stochastic optimization studies, it is usually assumed that the gradient noise has a bounded variance. However, recent research shows that the heavy-tailed noise, which allows an unbounded variance, is closer to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-15 Jun Hu , Chao Sun , Bo Chen , Jianzheng Wang , Zheming Wang

Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants typically relies on the assumption of uniformly bounded variance, a condition that frequently fails in practical non-convex settings, such as neural network training, as well as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Arda Fazla , Ege C. Kaya , Antesh Upadhyay , Abolfazl Hashemi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning problems to efficiently perform empirical risk minimization, yet, in practice, SGD is known to stall before reaching the actual minimizer of the empirical risk. SGD…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-09 Vivak Patel

We study convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex function whose subgradients are estimated under heavy-tailed noise. Existing work often employs…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Chuan He , Zhaosong Lu

In this paper, we examine the time it takes for stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to reach the global minimum of a general, non-convex loss function. We approach this question through the lens of randomly perturbed dynamical systems and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-10 Waïss Azizian , Franck Iutzeler , Jérôme Malick , Panayotis Mertikopoulos

We study convergence lower bounds of without-replacement stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for solving smooth (strongly-)convex finite-sum minimization problems. Unlike most existing results focusing on final iterate lower bounds in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Jaeyoung Cha , Jaewook Lee , Chulhee Yun

In recent years, non-convex optimization problems are more often described by generalized $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness assumption rather than standard one. Meanwhile, severely corrupted data used in these problems has increased the demand for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Nikita Kornilov , Philip Zmushko , Andrei Semenov , Mark Ikonnikov , Alexander Gasnikov , Alexander Beznosikov

Many relevant problems in the area of systems and control, such as controller synthesis, observer design and model reduction, can be viewed as optimization problems involving dynamical systems: for instance, maximizing performance in the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-15 Pascal Den Boef , Jos Maubach , Wil Schilders , Nathan van de Wouw

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-14 Yadong Mu , Wei Liu , Wei Fan

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is arguably the most important single algorithm in modern machine learning. Although SGD with unbiased gradient estimators has been studied extensively over at least half a century, SGD variants relying on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Yury Demidovich , Grigory Malinovsky , Igor Sokolov , Peter Richtárik