We prove a sharp lower bound for smooth nonconvex stochastic optimization with uniformly bounded gradient noise. In the \(K=1\) fresh-sample model, every randomized adaptive algorithm requires $$Ω\left( \frac{ΔL}{ε^2} + \frac{ΔLσ^2}{ε^4} \right)$$ queries to find a point with expected gradient norm at most \(ε\).
arXiv:2511. 19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure.
By Kaiyi Ji
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.
By Zijian Liu
arXiv:2606. 05438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the deterministic first-order oracle complexity of finding \(\epsilon\)-stationary points in smooth nonconvex optimization when the objective satisfies higher-order smoothness assumptions.
By Dongruo Zhou
arXiv:2511. 13999v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the running time, in terms of first order oracle queries, of differentially private empirical/population risk minimization of Lipschitz convex losses.
By Michael Menart, Aleksandar Nikolov
arXiv:2310. 15976v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: signSGD is attractive in nonconvex optimization because it communicates sign-valued rather than full-precision gradients.
By Zhen Qin, Zhishuai Liu, Pan Xu
arXiv:2606. 08028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study high-probability regret bounds for online convex optimization (OCO) with strongly convex losses and establish three results that resolve open questions at the intersection of noise adaptivity, feedback structure, and constraint satisfaction.
By Wentao Zhang, Yutong Zhang, Wentao Mo
arXiv:2606. 00703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-precision pretraining (FP8, MXFP4, NVFP4) is now standard for frontier language models, yet the literature is almost entirely achievability -- algorithms and empirical scaling laws -- with no matching characterization of what is information-theoretically possible.
By Munsik Kim
arXiv:2607. 21975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) optimizes $J(B,A)=\mathcal L(W_\mathrm{base}+sBA)$ over two adapters $B \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $A \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ that form a low-rank update to a frozen pretrained weight matrix $W_\mathrm{base} \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$.
By Ru Wang, Chengchang Liu, John C. S. Lui
arXiv:2504. 09951v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization variable.
By Ahmet Alacaoglu, Yura Malitsky, Stephen J. Wright
arXiv:2607. 27073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study online convex optimization (OCO) in non-stationary environments under heavy-tailed noise, where the stochastic gradient oracle admits only a finite $p$-th central moment for some $p \in (1, 2]$.
By Vaneet Aggarwal
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