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Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Maxim Raginsky , Alexander Rakhlin , Matus Telgarsky

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been found to be surprisingly effective in training a variety of deep neural networks. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how and why SGD can train these complex networks towards a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-03 Yi Zhou , Junjie Yang , Huishuai Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Vahid Tarokh

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) has become the standard algorithm for training machine learning models with rigorous privacy guarantees. Despite its widespread use, the theoretical understanding of its long-run…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Amartya Mukherjee , Jun Liu

Sign-based optimization algorithms, such as SignSGD and Muon, have garnered significant attention for their remarkable performance in training large foundation models. Despite this empirical success, we still lack a theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Hongyi Tao , Dingzhi Yu , Lijun Zhang

Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Kang Chen , Yasong Feng , Tianyu Wang

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD) is a standard way to exploit heterogeneous compute resources in distributed learning: instead of forcing fast workers to wait for slow ones, the server updates the model whenever a gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ammar Mahran , Artavazd Maranjyan , Peter Richtárik

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has played a central role in machine learning. However, it requires a carefully hand-picked stepsize for fast convergence, which is notoriously tedious and time-consuming to tune. Over the last several…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Zhenxun Zhuang , Ashok Cutkosky , Francesco Orabona

We establish a data-dependent notion of algorithmic stability for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), and employ it to develop novel generalization bounds. This is in contrast to previous distribution-free algorithmic stability results for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-19 Ilja Kuzborskij , Christoph H. Lampert

This paper considers the problem of asynchronous stochastic nonconvex optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise and arbitrarily heterogeneous computation times across workers. We propose an asynchronous normalized stochastic gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-28 Yidong Wu , Luo Luo

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are widely used and highly effective optimization methods in machine learning, especially for neural network training. By using a single datum or a small subset of the data, selected…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-01-21 Bangti Jin , Zeljko Kereta , Yuxin Xia

The stochastic gradient noise (SGN) is a significant factor in the success of stochastic gradient descent (SGD). Following the central limit theorem, SGN was initially modeled as Gaussian, and lately, it has been suggested that stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Barak Battash , Ofir Lindenbaum

Understanding the limitations of gradient methods, and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) in particular, is a central challenge in learning theory. To that end, a commonly used tool is the Statistical Queries (SQ) framework, which studies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Daniel Barzilai , Ohad Shamir

We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Andrea Schioppa

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is being used routinely for optimizing non-convex functions. Yet, the standard convergence theory for SGD in the smooth non-convex setting gives a slow sublinear convergence to a stationary point. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-23 Robert M. Gower , Othmane Sebbouh , Nicolas Loizou

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the method of choice in many machine learning tasks thanks to its scalability and efficiency in dealing with large-scale problems. In this paper, we focus on the shuffling version of SGD which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-27 Lam M. Nguyen , Trang H. Tran

The empirical evidence indicates that stochastic optimization with heavy-tailed gradient noise is more appropriate to characterize the training of machine learning models than that with standard bounded gradient variance noise. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Hongxu Chen , Ke Wei , Xiaoming Yuan , Luo Luo

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) often slows in the late stage of training due to anisotropic curvature and gradient noise. We analyze preconditioned SGD in the geometry induced by a symmetric positive definite matrix $\mathbf{M}$,…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-11-26 Mitchell Scott , Tianshi Xu , Ziyuan Tang , Alexandra Pichette-Emmons , Qiang Ye , Yousef Saad , Yuanzhe Xi

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) has become a cornerstone of neural network optimization due to its computational efficiency and generalization capabilities. However, the gradient noise introduced by SGD is often assumed to be uncorrelated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Marcel Kühn , Bernd Rosenow

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its variants are the most used algorithms in machine learning applications. In particular, SGD with adaptive learning rates and momentum is the industry standard to train deep networks. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-29 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

Understanding the convergence performance of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent method (Async-SGD) has received increasing attention in recent years due to their foundational role in machine learning. To date, however, most of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-02 Xin Zhang , Jia Liu , Zhengyuan Zhu