arXiv Machine Learning

Bregman meets L\'evy: Stochastic mirror descent with heavy-tailed noise in continuous and discrete time

arXiv:2606. 03769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the robustness of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under heavy-tailed noise, focusing on whether the method retains its convergence guarantees when run with infinite-variance stochastic gradient input.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Scaling Limits of Constant-Stepsize SGD at Flat Minima

arXiv:2607. 16384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant stepsize $\alpha$, the invariant law of the iterates, centered at a minimizer, describes the behavior of the algorithm over long time horizons.

By Jingyi Zhang, Cheng Mao, Debankur Mukherjee
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 13

Solving Stochastic Fixed-Point Equations with High Probability

arXiv:2607. 09097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study stochastic fixed-point equations $\mathbf{T}(\mathbf{x}) = \mathbf{x}$ over normed spaces $(\mathcal{E}, \|\cdot\|)$, where the operator $\mathbf{T}$ is nonexpansive or contractive and is accessed only through unbiased stochastic evaluations with bounded second central moment.

By Jelena Diakonikolas
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Almost Sure Convergence Analysis of Stochastic Gradient Methods with Clipping and Additive Noise

The paper proves that stochastic gradient descent with gradient clipping and additive Gaussian noise (SGD‑CN) converges almost surely under smoothness and bounded noise assumptions, given standard decaying step sizes. The analysis extends to momentum variants such as the stochastic heavy ball and Nesterov's accelerated gradient, showing that careful energy constructions yield similar guarantees. These results provide stronger theoretical foundations for understanding the pathwise behaviour of clipped stochastic gradient methods in both convex and nonconvex regimes.

By Amartya Mukherjee, Jun Liu