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In this work we study high probability bounds for stochastic subgradient methods under heavy tailed noise. In this setting the noise is only assumed to have finite variance as opposed to a sub-Gaussian distribution for which it is known…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-04-16 Daniela A. Parletta , Andrea Paudice , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

Existing decentralized stochastic optimization methods assume the lower-level loss function is strongly convex and the stochastic gradient noise has finite variance. These strong assumptions typically are not satisfied in real-world machine…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xinwen Zhang , Yihan Zhang , Heng Liang , Hongchang Gao

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

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

This paper studies decentralized stochastic nonconvex optimization problem over row-stochastic networks. We consider the heavy-tailed gradient noise which is empirically observed in many popular real-world applications. Specifically, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-19 Menglian Wang , Zhuanghua Liu , Luo Luo

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

During recent years the interest of optimization and machine learning communities in high-probability convergence of stochastic optimization methods has been growing. One of the main reasons for this is that high-probability complexity…

Understanding the generalization properties of optimization algorithms under heavy-tailed noise has gained growing attention. However, the existing theoretical results mainly focus on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and the analysis of…

Low-rank matrix estimation under heavy-tailed noise is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs, especially since robust loss…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-12 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

Heavy-tailed noise has attracted growing attention in nonconvex stochastic optimization, as numerous empirical studies suggest it offers a more realistic assumption than standard bounded variance assumption. In this work, we investigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Xinwen Zhang , Hongchang Gao

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

We study nonconvex stochastic optimization under the Blum-Gladyshev ($\mathsf{BG}$-0) noise model, where the stochastic gradient variance grows quadratically with the distance from the initialization. We consider this problem under both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Antesh Upadhyay , Arda Fazla , Abolfazl Hashemi

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

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

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

Stochastic first-order methods such as Stochastic Extragradient (SEG) or Stochastic Gradient Descent-Ascent (SGDA) for solving smooth minimax problems and, more generally, variational inequality problems (VIP) have been gaining a lot of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-02 Eduard Gorbunov , Marina Danilova , David Dobre , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov , Gauthier Gidel

We lower bound the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm at most $\epsilon$) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-01 Yossi Arjevani , Yair Carmon , John C. Duchi , Dylan J. Foster , Nathan Srebro , Blake Woodworth

High-dimensional linear regression under heavy-tailed noise or outlier corruption is challenging, both computationally and statistically. Convex approaches have been proven statistically optimal but suffer from high computational costs,…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-05-11 Yinan Shen , Jingyang Li , Jian-Feng Cai , Dong Xia

Under mild assumptions stochastic gradient methods asymptotically achieve an optimal rate of convergence if the arithmetic mean of all iterates is returned as an approximate optimal solution. However, in the absence of stochastic noise, the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-06 Melinda Hagedorn , Florian Jarre

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Dongruo Zhou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu