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Using gradient descent (GD) with fixed or decaying step-size is a standard practice in unconstrained optimization problems. However, when the loss function is only locally convex, such a step-size schedule artificially slows GD down as it…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-02-03 Nhat Ho , Tongzheng Ren , Sujay Sanghavi , Purnamrita Sarkar , Rachel Ward

We introduce a perturbed preconditioned gradient descent (PPGD) method for the unconstrained minimization of a strongly convex objective $G$ with a locally Lipschitz continuous gradient. We assume that $G(v)=E(v)+F(v)$ and that the gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Jea-Hyun Park , Abner J. Salgado , Steven M. Wise

In overparameterized logistic regression, gradient descent (GD) iterates diverge in norm while converging in direction to the maximum $\ell_2$-margin solution -- a phenomenon known as the implicit bias of GD. This work investigates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Jingfeng Wu , Peter Bartlett , Matus Telgarsky , Bin Yu

In this paper we revisit the DP stochastic convex optimization (SCO) problem. For convex smooth losses, it is well-known that the canonical DP-SGD (stochastic gradient descent) achieves the optimal rate of $O\left(\frac{LR}{\sqrt{n}} +…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-04 Christopher A. Choquette-Choo , Arun Ganesh , Abhradeep Thakurta

In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-14 Kangqiao Liu , Liu Ziyin , Masahito Ueda

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for minimizing objective functions that arise in machine learning. For constant step-sized SGD, the iterates form a Markov chain on a general state space. Focusing on a class of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-26 David Shirokoff , Philip Zaleski

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for composite optimization problems with $N$ sequential operators subject to perturbations in both the forward and backward passes. Unlike classical analyses that treat gradient noise as additive…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-25 Boao Kong , Hengrui Zhang , Kun Yuan

The stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization algorithm plays a central role in a series of machine learning applications. The scientific literature provides a vast amount of upper error bounds for the SGD method. Much less attention…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-10-05 Arnulf Jentzen , Philippe von Wurstemberger

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-06 Wenqing Hu , Chris Junchi Li , Lei Li , Jian-Guo Liu

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

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is being used routinely for optimizing non-convex functions. Yet, the standard convergence theory for SGD in the smooth non-convex setting gives a slow sublinear convergence to a stationary point. In this…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-23 Robert M. Gower , Othmane Sebbouh , Nicolas Loizou

One of the major issues in stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods is how to choose an appropriate step size while running the algorithm. Since the traditional line search technique does not apply for stochastic optimization algorithms,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-24 Conghui Tan , Shiqian Ma , Yu-Hong Dai , Yuqiu Qian

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a foundational algorithm for large-scale statistical learning and stochastic optimization. However, statistical inference based on SGD iterates remains challenging when stochastic gradients have infinite…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-26 Jose Blanchet , Peter Glynn , Wenhao Yang

We analyze the last-iterate convergence of the Anchored Gradient Descent Ascent algorithm for smooth convex-concave min-max problems. While previous work established a last-iterate rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/t^{2-2p})$ for the squared gradient…

We demonstrate that for strongly log-convex densities whose potentials are discontinuous on manifolds, the ULA algorithm converges with stepsize bias of order $1/2$ in Wasserstein-p distance. Our resulting bound is then of the same order as…

Probability · Mathematics 2023-12-05 Tim Johnston , Sotirios Sabanis

The non-asymptotic analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) typically yields bounds that decompose into a bias term and a variance term. In this work, we focus on the bias component and study the extent to which SGD can match the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-02 Daniel Cortild , Lucas Ketels , Juan Peypouquet , Guillaume Garrigos

Gradient Temporal Difference (GTD) algorithms (Sutton et al., 2008, 2009) are the first $O(d)$ ($d$ is the number features) algorithms that have convergence guarantees for off-policy learning with linear function approximation. Liu et al.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Hengshuai Yao

We revisit the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for solving convex optimization problems that serve as highly popular convex relaxations for many important low-rank matrix recovery problems such as \textit{matrix completion},…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Dan Garber

Recent empirical work on stochastic gradient descent (SGD) applied to over-parameterized deep learning has shown that most gradient components over epochs are quite small. Inspired by such observations, we rigorously study properties of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-19 Yingxue Zhou , Xinyan Li , Arindam Banerjee