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Stochastic optimization via Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a fundamental problem in statistics and optimization. This paper revisits Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for strongly convex objectives, establishing tight, uniform-in-time…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Kang Chen , Yasong Feng , Tianyu Wang

We study the convergence of the last iterate (i.e., the $(N+1)$-th iterate) of the AdaGrad method. Although AdaGrad -- an adaptive subgradient method -- underpins a wide class of algorithms, most existing convergence analyses focus on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Margarita Preobrazhenskaia , Makar Sidorov , Igor Preobrazhenskii , Eduard Gorbunov

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

Distributed stochastic gradient methods are widely used to preserve data privacy and ensure scalability in large-scale learning tasks. While existing theory on distributed momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (mSGD) mainly focuses on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-19 Difei Cheng , Ruinan Jin , Hong Qiao , Bo Zhang

We study convergence properties of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for convex objectives without assumptions on smoothness or strict convexity. We consider the question of establishing that with high probability the objective evaluated at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-23 Andrea Schioppa

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-02-11 Christopher De Sa , Kunle Olukotun , Christopher Ré

We consider linear prediction with a convex Lipschitz loss, or more generally, stochastic convex optimization problems of generalized linear form, i.e.~where each instantaneous loss is a scalar convex function of a linear function. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Idan Amir , Roi Livni , Nathan Srebro

We study gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize for $\ell_2$-regularized logistic regression with linearly separable data. Classical theory suggests small stepsizes to ensure monotonic reduction of the optimization objective,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-04 Jingfeng Wu , Pierre Marion , Peter Bartlett

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is almost ubiquitously used for training non-convex optimization tasks. Recently, a hypothesis proposed by Keskar et al. [2017] that large batch methods tend to converge to sharp minimizers has received…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-04 Xiaowu Dai , Yuhua Zhu

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) enables scalable distributed training but suffers from gradient staleness. Existing mitigation strategies, such as delay-adaptive learning rates and staleness-aware filtering, typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tehila Dahan , Roie Reshef , Sharon Goldstein , Kfir Y. Levy

Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-11 Vien V. Mai , Mikael Johansson

We study last-iterate convergence of SGD with greedy step size over smooth quadratics in the interpolation regime, a setting which captures the classical Randomized Kaczmarz algorithm as well as other popular iterative linear system…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Michał Dereziński , Xiaoyu Dong

The gradient descent (GD) has been one of the most common optimizer in machine learning. In particular, the loss landscape of a neural network is typically sharpened during the initial phase of training, making the training dynamics hover…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-10-14 Han Bao , Shinsaku Sakaue , Yuki Takezawa

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 convergence rate for the last iterate of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and stochastic heavy ball (SHB) in the parametric setting when the objective function $F$ is globally convex or non-convex whose gradient is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-11 Marcel Hudiani

Many problems encountered in science and engineering can be formulated as estimating a low-rank object (e.g., matrices and tensors) from incomplete, and possibly corrupted, linear measurements. Through the lens of matrix and tensor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Cong Ma , Xingyu Xu , Tian Tong , Yuejie Chi

In machine learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely deployed to train models using highly non-convex objectives with equally complex noise models. Unfortunately, SGD theory often makes restrictive assumptions that fail to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Vivak Patel , Shushu Zhang , Bowen Tian

We provide the first finite-particle convergence rate for Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD), a popular algorithm for approximating a probability distribution with a collection of particles. Specifically, whenever the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jiaxin Shi , Lester Mackey

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants have established themselves as the go-to algorithms for large-scale machine learning problems with independent samples due to their generalization performance and intrinsic computational…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-08-25 Hao Chen , Lili Zheng , Raed Al Kontar , Garvesh Raskutti