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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

We study the distributed stochastic optimization (DSO) problem under a heavy-tailed noise condition by utilizing a multi-agent system. Despite the extensive research on DSO algorithms used to solve DSO problems under light-tailed noise…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Zhan Yu , Lan Liao , Deming Yuan , Daniel W. C. Ho , Ding-Xuan Zhou

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

We study stochastic zeroth-order (ZO) optimization of smooth nonconvex objectives under heavy-tailed sample-gradient noise. This regime is motivated by empirical evidence that gradient noise in modern machine learning can violate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Taha El Bakkali , El Mahdi Chayti , Qiuyi Zhang , Imane Rahali , Omar Saadi

Stochastic optimization is fundamental to modern machine learning. Recent research has extended the study of stochastic first-order methods (SFOMs) from light-tailed to heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in practice, with clipping…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Chuan He

Large scale optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning and data analysis and there is a plethora of algorithms for solving such problems. Many of these algorithms employ sub-sampling, as a way to either speed up the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-02-29 Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

Optimization under heavy-tailed noise has become popular recently, since it better fits many modern machine learning tasks, as captured by empirical observations. Concretely, instead of a finite second moment on gradient noise, a bounded…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Zijian Liu

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

We study high-probability convergence guarantees of learning on streaming data in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In the proposed scenario, the model is updated in an online fashion, as new information is observed, without storing any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-02 Aleksandar Armacki , Pranay Sharma , Gauri Joshi , Dragana Bajovic , Dusan Jakovetic , Soummya Kar

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

Methods with adaptive stepsizes, such as AdaGrad and Adam, are essential for training modern Deep Learning models, especially Large Language Models. Typically, the noise in the stochastic gradients is heavy-tailed for the later ones.…

We present a new accelerated stochastic second-order method that is robust to both gradient and Hessian inexactness, which occurs typically in machine learning. We establish theoretical lower bounds and prove that our algorithm achieves…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-28 Artem Agafonov , Dmitry Kamzolov , Alexander Gasnikov , Ali Kavis , Kimon Antonakopoulos , Volkan Cevher , Martin Takáč

Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process. To manage this realistic and challenging setting, new mechanisms, such as gradient clipping and gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Zijian Liu

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

Gradient clipping is a widely used technique in Machine Learning and Deep Learning (DL), known for its effectiveness in mitigating the impact of heavy-tailed noise, which frequently arises in the training of large language models.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-30 Savelii Chezhegov , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Samuel Horváth , Eduard Gorbunov

This paper considers the smooth bilevel optimization in which the lower-level problem is strongly convex and the upper-level problem is possibly nonconvex. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access the unbiased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

We consider non-convex stochastic optimization using first-order algorithms for which the gradient estimates may have heavy tails. We show that a combination of gradient clipping, momentum, and normalized gradient descent yields convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Ashok Cutkosky , Harsh Mehta

We investigate high-dimensional sparse regression when both the noise and the design matrix exhibit heavy-tailed behavior. Standard algorithms typically fail in this regime, as heavy-tailed covariates distort the empirical risk geometry. We…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-12 Kaiyuan Zhou , Xiaoyu Zhang , Wenyang Zhang , Di Wang

In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-11-02 Mingrui Liu , Tianbao Yang

In this paper, we consider nonlinear optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Stochastic Sequential Quadratic Programming (TR-SSQP) method and establish its…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-02 Yuchen Fang , Javad Lavaei , Sen Na