Vanilla SGD with Momentum Survives Heavy-Tailed Noise: Convergence Analysis without Gradient Clipping or Normalization
arXiv:2607. 08104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of modern optimization.
arXiv:2607. 08104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of modern optimization.
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...
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.
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.
arXiv:2506.04192v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Frank-Wolfe is a classical optimization method for solving constrained optimization problems. On the other hand, recent optimizers...
arXiv:2510.11676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study convex composite optimization problems, where the objective function is given by the sum of a prox-friendly function and a convex fu...
arXiv:2508.04860v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of large-scale optimization, yet its theoretical behavior under heavy-tailed noise -- comm...
arXiv:2406. 13041v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point.
The paper establishes the first optimal last‑iterate convergence rates, in high probability, for Clipped‑SGD when the gradient noise is heavy‑tailed. It addresses the gap left by earlier results that required strong noise assumptions, such as exponentially decaying tails. By proving these rates, the authors provide theoretical support for the practical effectiveness of gradient clipping in stochastic convex optimization.
arXiv:2602. 11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries.
arXiv:2605. 18694v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many tasks in modern machine learning are observed to involve heavy-tailed gradient noise during the optimization process.
arXiv:2607. 12360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The cooldown phase of a warmup-stable-decay (WSD) learning-rate schedule, now a default in large-model pretraining, lowers the final training loss in some settings and does nothing in others.