arXiv:2512. 02342v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The stochastic Polyak step size (SPS) has proven to be a promising choice for stochastic gradient descent (SGD), delivering competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art methods on smooth convex and non-convex optimization problems, including deep neural network training.
By Dimitris Oikonomou, Nicolas Loizou
arXiv:2509. 14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning.
By Jean-Fran\c{c}ois Aujol, J\'er\'emie Bigot, Camille Castera
The paper introduces Batched SGD, a variant that groups online samples into epochs and performs a single update per epoch using a low‑variance gradient estimate. This batching approach allows a straightforward high‑probability analysis without restrictive assumptions or auxiliary sequences, yielding near‑optimal rates for both strongly convex and non‑convex objectives under standard smoothness and sub‑Gaussian noise conditions. The authors also extend the method to federated learning, providing the first high‑probability guarantees with logarithmic communication complexity, linear speedup in the number of agents, and robustness to data heterogeneity.
By Feng Zhu, Robert W. Heath Jr., Aritra Mitra
arXiv:2606. 30455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard convergence analysis of mini-batch stochastic gradient descent (SGD) models gradient noise using a single variance term that treats all parameter directions equally, ignoring the fact that noise in high-curvature directions has less impact because learning rates are already constrained there.
By Muhammad Hamza (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur), Ayush Goel (Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur)
arXiv:2607. 09167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Schedule-Free methods have attracted growing interest for alleviating the burden of designing and tuning a learning rate scheduler, while matching and sometimes even outperforming optimizers with tuned schedulers.
By Jiseok Chae, Donghwan Kim
arXiv:2610.00446v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: As an alternative to the standard geometric analyses, we give an exact, information-theoretic analysis of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and its v...
By Akshay Balsubramani