The paper presents a convergence analysis of the Wasserstein proximal algorithm without requiring geodesic convexity of the objective functional. By assuming a Wasserstein analog of the Euclidean Polyak–Łojasiewicz inequality, the authors prove that the algorithm achieves unbiased, linear convergence, improving on previous rates that required strong geodesic convexity. The analysis is extended to inexact proximal steps for geodesically semiconvex objectives, and numerical experiments show faster convergence than noisy gradient descent on mean‑field neural networks.
By Shuailong Zhu, Xiaohui Chen
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. 39144v2 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a sharp Gaussian approximation for the invariant law of constant-stepsize SGD with bounded additive noise generated by an exogenous uniformly ergodic Markov chain.
By Junghoon Seo
arXiv:2606. 27767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing functionals over the space of probability measures is now ubiquitous in machine learning.
By Cl\'ement Bonet, Pierre-Cyril Aubin-Frankowski, Youssef Mroueh
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
arXiv:2608. 02844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a class of diffusion-based stochastic particle optimisation methods for loss functions with intractable gradients.
By Jiechen Jackie Zhang, O. Deniz Akyildiz