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Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants are mainstream methods to train deep neural networks. Since neural networks are non-convex, more and more works study the dynamic behavior of SGD and the impact to its generalization,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Qi Meng , Shiqi Gong , Wei Chen , Zhi-Ming Ma , Tie-Yan Liu

Previous works on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) often focus on its success. In this work, we construct worst-case optimization problems illustrating that, when not in the regimes that the previous works often assume, SGD can exhibit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Liu Ziyin , Botao Li , James B. Simon , Masahito Ueda

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

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a fundamental tool for training deep neural networks across a variety of tasks. In self-supervised learning, different input categories map to distinct manifolds in the embedded neural state space.…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-03-04 Guanming Zhang , Stefano Martiniani

Learning in deep neural networks (DNNs) is implemented through minimizing a highly non-convex loss function, typically by a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method. This learning process can effectively find good wide minima without being…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Guozhang Chen , Cheng Kevin Qu , Pulin Gong

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely believed to perform implicit regularization when used to train deep neural networks, but the precise manner in which this occurs has thus far been elusive. We prove that SGD minimizes an average…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-01-17 Pratik Chaudhari , Stefano Soatto

In this paper we analyze the behaviour of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), a widely used method in supervised learning for optimizing neural network weights via a minimization of non-convex loss functions. Since the pioneering work of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Davide Barbieri , Matteo Bonforte , Peio Ibarrondo

Neural networks are trained by optimizing multi-dimensional sets of fitting parameters on non-convex loss landscapes. Low-loss regions of the landscapes correspond to the parameter sets that perform well on the training data. A key issue in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jianneng Yu , Alexandre V. Morozov

We show that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) escapes from sharp minima exponentially fast even before SGD reaches stationary distribution. SGD has been a de-facto standard training algorithm for various machine learning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-22 Hikaru Ibayashi , Masaaki Imaizumi

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular and efficient method with wide applications in training deep neural nets and other nonconvex models. While the behavior of SGD is well understood in the convex learning setting, the existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Yunwen Lei , Ting Hu , Guiying Li , Ke Tang

Understanding the implicit bias of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the key challenges in deep learning, especially for overparametrized models, where the local minimizers of the loss function $L$ can form a manifold.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Zhiyuan Li , Tianhao Wang , Sanjeev Arora

The empirical success of deep learning is often attributed to SGD's mysterious ability to avoid sharp local minima in the loss landscape, as sharp minima are known to lead to poor generalization. Recently, empirical evidence of heavy-tailed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-12 Xingyu Wang , Sewoong Oh , Chang-Han Rhee

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 analyze in a closed form the learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for a single-layer neural network classifying a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture where each cluster is assigned one of two labels. This problem provides…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Francesca Mignacco , Florent Krzakala , Pierfrancesco Urbani , Lenka Zdeborová

We perform an experimental study of the dynamics of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) in learning deep neural networks for several real and synthetic classification tasks. We show that in the initial epochs, almost all of the performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Preetum Nakkiran , Gal Kaplun , Dimitris Kalimeris , Tristan Yang , Benjamin L. Edelman , Fred Zhang , Boaz Barak

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

The representation of functions by artificial neural networks depends on a large number of parameters in a non-linear fashion. Suitable parameters of these are found by minimizing a 'loss functional', typically by stochastic gradient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Stephan Wojtowytsch

In several experimental reports on nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) was observed to prefer minimizers with flat basins in comparison to more deterministic methods, yet there is very…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-08 Vivak Patel

A large body of theory and empirical work hypothesizes a connection between the flatness of a neural network's loss landscape during training and its performance. However, there have been conceptually opposite pieces of evidence regarding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yizhou Xu , Pierfrancesco Beneventano , Isaac Chuang , Liu Ziyin

Models are expected to engage in invariance learning, which involves distinguishing the core relations that remain consistent across varying environments to ensure the predictions are safe, robust and fair. While existing works consider…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Yang Xu , Yihong Gu , Cong Fang