English
Related papers

Related papers: Gradient Descent's Last Iterate is Often (slightly…

200 papers

Low-precision training has become crucial for reducing the computational and memory costs of large-scale deep learning. However, quantizing gradients introduces magnitude shrinkage, which can change how stochastic gradient descent (SGD)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Vincent-Daniel Yun

Differentially-private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a family of iterative machine learning training algorithms that privatize gradients to generate a sequence of differentially-private (DP) model parameters. It is also the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Weiwei Kong , Mónica Ribero

Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Si Yi Meng , Baptiste Goujaud , Antonio Orvieto , Christopher De Sa

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Lei Qin , Michael Cantoni , Ye Pu

This paper proposes a thorough theoretical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with non-increasing step sizes. First, we show that the recursion defining SGD can be provably approximated by solutions of a time inhomogeneous…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-02 Xavier Fontaine , Valentin De Bortoli , Alain Durmus

In this paper, we establish new convergence results for the quantized distributed gradient descent and suggest a novel strategy of choosing the stepsizes for the high-performance of the algorithm. Under the strongly convexity assumption on…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-03 Woocheol Choi , Myeong-Su Lee

Schedule-Free SGD, proposed in [Defazio et al., 2024], achieves optimal convergence rates without requiring the training horizon in advance, by replacing learning rate schedules with a principled form of iterate averaging. However, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Dimitris Oikonomou , Matthew Buchholz , Yuen-Man Pun , Robert M. Gower , Nicolas Loizou

Forward gradient descent (FGD) has been proposed as a biologically more plausible alternative of gradient descent as it can be computed without backward pass. Considering the linear model with $d$ parameters, previous work has found that…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2024-11-27 Niklas Dexheimer , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

Gradient Descent (GD) is a powerful workhorse of modern machine learning thanks to its scalability and efficiency in high-dimensional spaces. Its ability to find local minimisers is only guaranteed for losses with Lipschitz gradients, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-27 Lei Chen , Joan Bruna

We identify and analyze a fundamental limitation of the classical projected subgradient method in nonsmooth convex optimization: the inevitable failure caused by the absence of valid subgradients at boundary points. We show that, under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Zhihan Zhu , Yanhao Zhang , Yong Xia

The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-19 Xiaoyu Wang , Sindri Magnússon , Mikael Johansson

We consider gradient descent with constant stepsizes and derive exact worst-case convergence rates on the minimum gradient norm of the iterates. Our analysis covers all possible stepsizes and arbitrary upper/lower bounds on the curvature of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-23 Teodor Rotaru , François Glineur , Panagiotis Patrinos

We study gradient descent (GD) dynamics on logistic regression problems with large, constant step sizes. For linearly-separable data, it is known that GD converges to the minimizer with arbitrarily large step sizes, a property which no…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Si Yi Meng , Antonio Orvieto , Daniel Yiming Cao , Christopher De Sa

We consider gradient descent (GD) with a constant stepsize applied to logistic regression with linearly separable data, where the constant stepsize $\eta$ is so large that the loss initially oscillates. We show that GD exits this initial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Jingfeng Wu , Peter L. Bartlett , Matus Telgarsky , Bin Yu

In this paper we study the smooth convex-concave saddle point problem. Specifically, we analyze the last iterate convergence properties of the Extragradient (EG) algorithm. It is well known that the ergodic (averaged) iterates of EG…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-08 Noah Golowich , Sarath Pattathil , Constantinos Daskalakis , Asuman Ozdaglar

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

We consider the optimization of a smooth and strongly convex objective using constant step-size stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and study its properties through the prism of Markov chains. We show that, for unbiased gradient estimates…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-11-25 Ibrahim Merad , Stéphane Gaïffas

Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-08 David Newton , Raghu Bollapragada , Raghu Pasupathy , Nung Kwan Yip

We study the iteration complexity of Lipschitz convex optimization problems satisfying a general error bound. We show that for this class of problems, subgradient descent with either Polyak stepsizes or decaying stepsizes achieves minimax…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-17 Alex L. Wang

We investigate the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method where the step size lies within a banded region instead of being given by a fixed formula. The optimal convergence rate under mild conditions and large initial step size is proved.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Xiaoyu Wang , Ya-xiang Yuan