English
Related papers

Related papers: Improved high-dimensional estimation with Langevin…

200 papers

Unsupervised learning aims at the discovery of hidden structure that drives the observations in the real world. It is essential for success in modern machine learning. Latent variable models are versatile in unsupervised learning and have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-06-13 Furong Huang

Noisy particle gradient descent (NPGD) is an algorithm to minimize convex functions over the space of measures that include an entropy term. In the many-particle limit, this algorithm is described by a Mean-Field Langevin dynamics - a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-12 Lénaïc Chizat

We aim to make stochastic gradient descent (SGD) adaptive to (i) the noise $\sigma^2$ in the stochastic gradients and (ii) problem-dependent constants. When minimizing smooth, strongly-convex functions with condition number $\kappa$, we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-24 Sharan Vaswani , Benjamin Dubois-Taine , Reza Babanezhad

We study the Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm for non-convex optimization. The algorithm performs stochastic gradient descent, where in each step it injects appropriately scaled Gaussian noise to the update. We analyze…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Yuchen Zhang , Percy Liang , Moses Charikar

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

When training neural networks, it has been widely observed that a large step size is essential in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for obtaining superior models. However, the effect of large step sizes on the success of SGD is not well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Martin Jaggi , Sebastian Stich

In many high-dimensional estimation problems the main task consists in minimizing a cost function, which is often strongly non-convex when scanned in the space of parameters to be estimated. A standard solution to flatten the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-09-04 Giulio Biroli , Chiara Cammarota , Federico Ricci-Tersenghi

We consider the problem of sampling from a target distribution, which is \emph {not necessarily logconcave}, in the context of empirical risk minimization and stochastic optimization as presented in Raginsky et al. (2017). Non-asymptotic…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2021-02-03 Ngoc Huy Chau , Éric Moulines , Miklos Rásonyi , Sotirios Sabanis , Ying Zhang

Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) is a popular variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent, where properly scaled isotropic Gaussian noise is added to an unbiased estimate of the gradient at each iteration. This modest change allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Maxim Raginsky , Alexander Rakhlin , Matus Telgarsky

The problem of least squares regression of a $d$-dimensional unknown parameter is considered. A stochastic gradient descent based algorithm with weighted iterate-averaging that uses a single pass over the data is studied and its convergence…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Kobi Cohen , Angelia Nedic , R. Srikant

A central issue in machine learning is how to train models on sensitive user data. Industry has widely adopted a simple algorithm: Stochastic Gradient Descent with noise (a.k.a. Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics). However, foundational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Jason M. Altschuler , Kunal Talwar

Hyperparameter tuning is one of the essential steps to guarantee the convergence of machine learning models. We argue that intuition about the optimal choice of hyperparameters for stochastic gradient descent can be obtained by studying a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-12-12 Chanju Park , Biagio Lucini , Gert Aarts

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants enable modern artificial intelligence. However, theoretical understanding lags far behind their empirical success. It is widely believed that SGD has a curious ability to avoid sharp local…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Xingyu Wang , Chang-Han Rhee

We provide a new convergence analysis of stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD) for sampling from a class of distributions that can be non-log-concave. At the core of our approach is a novel conductance analysis of SGLD using an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Difan Zou , Pan Xu , Quanquan Gu

The stochastic gradient Langevin Dynamics is one of the most fundamental algorithms to solve sampling problems and non-convex optimization appearing in several machine learning applications. Especially, its variance reduced versions have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Yuri Kinoshita , Taiji Suzuki

Gradient descent is one of the most widely used iterative algorithms in modern statistical learning. However, its precise algorithmic dynamics in high-dimensional settings remain only partially understood, which has limited its broader…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-19 Qiyang Han , Xiaocong Xu

We introduce adaptive, tuning-free step size schedules for gradient-based sampling algorithms obtained as time-discretizations of Wasserstein gradient flows. The result is a suite of tuning-free sampling algorithms, including tuning-free…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-10-30 Louis Sharrock , Christopher Nemeth

Gradient descent (GD) is known to converge quickly for convex objective functions, but it can be trapped at local minima. On the other hand, Langevin dynamics (LD) can explore the state space and find global minima, but in order to give…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-17 Jing Dong , Xin T. Tong

Single-Index Models are high-dimensional regression problems with planted structure, whereby labels depend on an unknown one-dimensional projection of the input via a generic, non-linear, and potentially non-deterministic transformation. As…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-14 Alex Damian , Loucas Pillaud-Vivien , Jason D. Lee , Joan Bruna

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