arXiv:2503. 04712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods.
By Daniel Yiming Cao, August Y. Chen, Karthik Sridharan, Benjamin Tang
arXiv:2504.09409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: In this paper, we study nonconvex constrained stochastic zeroth-order optimization problems with exact constraints and stochastic objective e...
By Qiankun Shi, Han Yuan, Xiao Wang, Hao Wang
arXiv:2606. 01521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central problem in machine learning is that models can achieve near-perfect training performance while generalizing substantially less well to unseen examples.
By Luca Muscarnera, Silas Ruhrberg Est\'evez, Yuanzhang Xiao, Mihaela Van der Schaar
arXiv:2209. 03282v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accelerating the convergence of second-order optimization, particularly Newton-type methods, remains a pivotal challenge in algorithmic research.
By John Chiang
arXiv:2608. 09523v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural network (DNN) training with stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its variants achieves strong empirical performance, yet classical optimization theory does not fully explain this success.
By Binchuan Qi
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: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:2607. 14731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Local SGD, also known as Federated Averaging, is a widely used distributed optimization algorithm.
By Kumar Kshitij Patel, Rustem Islamov, Sebastian U Stich, Aurelien Lucchi, Eduard Gorbunov, Lingxiao Wang
arXiv:2606. 11431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) extends Gradient Descent (GD) beyond Euclidean geometry and has recently reappeared as a lens for KL-regularized policy optimization in reinforcement learning and LLM post-training.
By Shira Vansover-Hager, Matan Schliserman, Ofir Schlisselberg, Tomer Koren
arXiv:2603. 05002v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Edge of Stability (EoS) is a phenomenon where the sharpness (largest eigenvalue) of the Hessian approaches and then hovers near the stability threshold $2/\eta$ during gradient descent (GD) with step size $\eta$.
By Rustem Islamov, Michael Crawshaw, Jeremy Cohen, Robert Gower
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
arXiv:2602. 02877v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies optimization for a family of problems termed $\textbf{compositional entropic risk minimization}$, in which each data's loss is formulated as a Log-Expectation-Exponential (Log-E-Exp) function.
By Xiyuan Wei, Linli Zhou, Bokun Wang, Chih-Jen Lin, Tianbao Yang