arXiv Machine Learning

A Tight Lower Bound for Smooth Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization with Bounded Gradient Noise

arXiv:2608. 09004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove a sharp lower bound for smooth nonconvex stochastic optimization with uniformly bounded gradient noise.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

Information-Theoretic Lower Bounds for Bit-Constrained Stochastic Optimization via a Reduction to Compressed Gaussian Mean Estimation

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 Machine Learning
Jul 27

On the Convergence of Stochastic Low-Rank Adaptation

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 Machine Learning
Jul 2

Towards Weaker Variance Assumptions for Stochastic Optimization

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 Machine Learning
Jul 13

Solving Stochastic Fixed-Point Equations with High Probability

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