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Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) stands as a cornerstone optimization algorithm with proven real-world empirical successes but relatively limited theoretical understanding. Recent research has illuminated a key factor contributing to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Gregory Dexter , Borja Ocejo , Sathiya Keerthi , Aman Gupta , Ayan Acharya , Rajiv Khanna

Modern machine learning is dominated by complex, overparameterized architectures capable of interpolating data and achieving zero training loss. For such models, we investigate the convergence properties of two popular modifications to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Aleksandr Lobanov , Anastasia Koloskova

The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing works based on stability have studied…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-03-08 Yi Zhou , Yingbin Liang , Huishuai Zhang

Algorithmic stability is an important notion that has proven powerful for deriving generalization bounds for practical algorithms. The last decade has witnessed an increasing number of stability bounds for different algorithms applied on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-10-31 Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Anant Raj , Umut Simsekli

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is one of the most widely used algorithms for large scale optimization problems. While classical theoretical analysis of SGD for convex problems studies (suffix) \emph{averages} of iterates and obtains…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-05-30 Prateek Jain , Dheeraj Nagaraj , Praneeth Netrapalli

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-22 Panayotis Mertikopoulos , Nadav Hallak , Ali Kavis , Volkan Cevher

We study population convergence guarantees of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for smooth convex objectives in the interpolation regime, where the noise at optimum is zero or near zero. The behavior of the last iterate of SGD in this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Amit Attia , Matan Schliserman , Uri Sherman , Tomer Koren

We study the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm for distributed training over $n$ workers which have varying computation and communication frequency over time. In this algorithm, workers compute stochastic gradients in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-17 Anastasia Koloskova , Sebastian U. Stich , Martin Jaggi

Heavy-tail phenomena in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) have been reported in several empirical studies. Experimental evidence in previous works suggests a strong interplay between the heaviness of the tails and generalization behavior of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-01-31 Anant Raj , Lingjiong Zhu , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Umut Şimşekli

We study the convergence properties and escape dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in one-dimensional landscapes, separately considering infinite- and finite-variance noise. Our main focus is to identify the time scales on which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Dmitry Dudukalov , Artem Logachov , Vladimir Lotov , Timofei Prasolov , Evgeny Prokopenko , Anton Tarasenko

Stochastic first-order methods are standard for training large-scale machine learning models. Random behavior may cause a particular run of an algorithm to result in a highly suboptimal objective value, whereas theoretical guarantees are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , Innokentiy Shibaev , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

Hogwild! implements asynchronous Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) where multiple threads in parallel access a common repository containing training data, perform SGD iterations and update shared state that represents a jointly learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-02 Marten van Dijk , Nhuong V. Nguyen , Toan N. Nguyen , Lam M. Nguyen , Quoc Tran-Dinh , Phuong Ha Nguyen

Understanding the algorithmic bias of \emph{stochastic gradient descent} (SGD) is one of the key challenges in modern machine learning and deep learning theory. Most of the existing works, however, focus on \emph{very small or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Jingfeng Wu , Difan Zou , Vladimir Braverman , Quanquan Gu

Stochastic convex optimization is a basic and well studied primitive in machine learning. It is well known that convex and Lipschitz functions can be minimized efficiently using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD). The Normalized Gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-29 Elad Hazan , Kfir Y. Levy , Shai Shalev-Shwartz

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

Minimax optimal convergence rates for classes of stochastic convex optimization problems are well characterized, where the majority of results utilize iterate averaged stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying step sizes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Rong Ge , Sham M. Kakade , Rahul Kidambi , Praneeth Netrapalli

A popular approach to minimize a finite-sum of convex functions is stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants. Fundamental research questions associated with SGD include: (i) To find a lower bound on the number of times that the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-16 Nuozhou Wang , Shuzhong Zhang

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is the algorithm we use to train neural networks. However, it remains poorly understood how the SGD navigates the highly nonlinear and degenerate loss landscape of a neural network. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Liu Ziyin , Hongchao Li , Masahito Ueda

Neural network compression has been an increasingly important subject, not only due to its practical relevance, but also due to its theoretical implications, as there is an explicit connection between compressibility and generalization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Yijun Wan , Melih Barsbey , Abdellatif Zaidi , Umut Simsekli

In this paper, we propose a method of distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD), with low communication load and computational complexity, and still fast convergence. To reduce the communication load, at each iteration of the algorithm,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Naeimeh Omidvar , Mohammad Ali Maddah-Ali , Hamed Mahdavi