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: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:2607. 08104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a cornerstone of modern optimization.
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: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.
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.
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.
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: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.
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...
arXiv:2604.13870v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the well-studied setting of minimizing a convex Lipschitz function using either gradient descent (GD) or its stochastic variant (...