The paper studies algorithms for computing the Entropic Gromov-Wasserstein (EGW) distance, a measure of discrepancy between metric measure spaces. It introduces Averaged Mirror Descent (AMD), which averages successive Mirror Descent steps and is proven to converge for any cost function, and shows that a dual gradient method with a fixed step size also converges for arbitrary costs, even when iterations are inexact. Empirical comparisons demonstrate that both AMD and the dual gradient method succeed on cases where classical Mirror Descent fails.
By Joanna Marks, Gabriel Rioux, Riccardo Passeggeri
arXiv:2609.06064v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Stochastic min-max optimization has attracted increasing attention due to its applications in modern machine learning, while existing theoretical stu...
By Tianxi Zhu, Yi Xu, Xiangyang Ji
arXiv:2606. 00520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many stochastic gradient methods are believed not to converge when the noise in stochastic gradients has only a finite $p$-th moment for $p\in\left(1,2\right)$, a setting known as the heavy-tailed noise assumption.
By Zijian Liu
arXiv:2606. 28573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern machine learning models are trained by optimizing high-dimensional non-convex empirical risk functions.
By Andrea Montanari, Kangjie Zhou
arXiv:2502. 00753v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Smoothness is crucial for attaining fast rates in first-order optimization.
By Dingzhi Yu, Wei Jiang, Hongyi Tao, Yuanyu Wan, Lijun Zhang
The paper introduces a distributionally robust method for learning hyperparameters of first‑order convex optimization algorithms. By minimizing a Wasserstein‑robust performance estimation problem over a dataset of problem instances, the approach interpolates between classical learning‑to‑optimize (L2O) and worst‑case PEP design. The authors solve the resulting problem with stochastic gradient descent, provide high‑probability risk bounds, and demonstrate that the learned algorithms outperform both worst‑case optimal and vanilla L2O baselines on logistic regression, LASSO, and linear programming tasks.
By Vinit Ranjan, Jisun Park, Bartolomeo Stellato
arXiv:2605. 07914v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sharpness-aware and gradient-alignment methods have been shown to improve generalization, however each family of methods targets a single geometric property of the loss landscape, while ignoring the other.
By Aristotelis Ballas, Christos Diou
arXiv:2608.27705v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The Maximum Entropy on the Mean (MEM) method provides a flexible computational framework for solving inverse problems by combining data fidelity with...
By Matthew King-Roskamp, Gabriel Rioux, Rustum Choksi, Tim Hoheisel
arXiv:2609.08133v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: In nonconvex optimization problems arising in geometric machine learning, data augmentation is commonly used to promote invariance by averaging empir...
By Behrooz Tahmasebi, Melanie Weber
arXiv:2505.20817v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Gradient clipping is widely used in language-model training to control heavy-tailed gradient noise and can improve convergence guarantees ove...
By Taha El Bakkali El Kadi, Savelii Chezhegov, Aleksandr Beznosikov, Samuel Horv\'ath, Eduard Gorbunov
The paper introduces Batched SGD, a variant that groups online samples into epochs and performs a single update per epoch using a low‑variance gradient estimate. This batching approach allows a straightforward high‑probability analysis without restrictive assumptions or auxiliary sequences, yielding near‑optimal rates for both strongly convex and non‑convex objectives under standard smoothness and sub‑Gaussian noise conditions. The authors also extend the method to federated learning, providing the first high‑probability guarantees with logarithmic communication complexity, linear speedup in the number of agents, and robustness to data heterogeneity.
By Feng Zhu, Robert W. Heath Jr., Aritra Mitra
arXiv:2406. 14340v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization method, as well as adaptive methods such as the Adam optimizer fail to converge if the learning rates do not converge to zero (particularly, in the situation of constant learning rates).
By Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Adrian Riekert