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:2609. 12785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Classical convergence guarantees for stochastic gradient methods typically assume Lipschitz-smooth objectives and finite-variance gradient noise, both frequently violated in practice.
By Misbah Uz Zaman, Anirbit Mukherjee
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.
By Zijian Liu
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
arXiv:2609. 30276v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We analyze the original same-step coordinate-wise AdaGrad under generalized smoothness and heavy-tailed noise with bounded variance.
By Alokendu Mazumder, Ayaan Mohd, Harshit Rawat, Arnab Roy, Mayank Baranwal, Punit Rathore
arXiv:2602. 05657v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of tail behaviour of SGD-induced processes has been attracting a lot of interest, due to offering strong guarantees with respect to individual runs of an algorithm.
By Aleksandar Armacki, Dragana Bajovi\'c, Du\v{s}an Jakoveti\'c, Soummya Kar, Ali H. Sayed
arXiv:2610. 10527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Heavy-tailed noise has been widely observed in modern machine learning, motivating the use of methods like gradient clipping and normalization.
By Aleksandar Armacki, Haoyuan Cai, Ali H. Sayed
arXiv:2609. 29458v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a tightened convergence analysis of clipped gradient descent on $(L_0, L_1)$-smooth functions, with quantitative constants.
By David A. R. Robin
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...
By Ilyas Fatkhullin, Florian H\"ubler, Guanghui Lan
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. 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.
By Pierre-Louis Cauvin, Panayotis Mertikopoulos
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