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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

The injection of heavy-tailed noise into the iterates of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has garnered growing interest in recent years due to its theoretical and empirical benefits for optimization and generalization. However, its…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-13 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Sinan Yıldırım , Lingjiong Zhu

Recent studies have shown that gradient descent (GD) can achieve improved generalization when its dynamics exhibits a chaotic behavior. However, to obtain the desired effect, the step-size should be chosen sufficiently large, a task which…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-25 Soon Hoe Lim , Yijun Wan , Umut Şimşekli

Recently there are a considerable amount of work devoted to the study of the algorithmic stability and generalization for stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the existing stability analysis requires to impose restrictive assumptions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yunwen Lei , Yiming Ying

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used in machine learning due to its computational efficiency and favorable generalization properties. Recently, it has been empirically demonstrated that the gradient noise in several deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-06-24 Thanh Huy Nguyen , Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Gaël Richard

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

Most prior results on differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) are derived under the simplistic assumption of uniform Lipschitzness, i.e., the per-sample gradients are uniformly bounded. We generalize uniform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Rudrajit Das , Satyen Kale , Zheng Xu , Tong Zhang , Sujay Sanghavi

Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is known to have poorer training and test performance on large neural networks, compared to ordinary stochastic gradient descent (SGD). In this paper, we perform a detailed study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Lauren Watson , Eric Gan , Mohan Dantam , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Rik Sarkar

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

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…

In this paper, we investigate a general class of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithms, called Conditioned SGD, based on a preconditioning of the gradient direction. Using a discrete-time approach with martingale tools, we establish…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-10-17 Rémi Leluc , François Portier

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

Machine learning models trained with \emph{stochastic} gradient descent (SGD) can generalize better than those trained with deterministic gradient descent (GD). In this work, we study SGD's impact on generalization through the lens of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hongjian Lan , Yucong Liu , Florian Schäfer

The gradient noise (GN) in the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm is often considered to be Gaussian in the large data regime by assuming that the \emph{classical} central limit theorem (CLT) kicks in. This assumption is often made…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-12-03 Umut Şimşekli , Mert Gürbüzbalaban , Thanh Huy Nguyen , Gaël Richard , Levent Sagun

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-23 Haiping Huang , Taro Toyoizumi

Gradient clipping is commonly used in training deep neural networks partly due to its practicability in relieving the exploding gradient problem. Recently, \citet{zhang2019gradient} show that clipped (stochastic) Gradient Descent (GD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-30 Bohang Zhang , Jikai Jin , Cong Fang , Liwei Wang

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 convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex function whose subgradients are estimated under heavy-tailed noise. Existing work often employs…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-14 Chuan He , Zhaosong Lu

We consider the problem of training a deep neural network with nonsmooth regularization to retrieve a sparse and efficient sub-structure. Our regularizer is only assumed to be lower semi-continuous and prox-bounded. We combine an adaptive…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-20 Dounia Lakhmiri , Dominique Orban , Andrea Lodi

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