Stochastic Non-Smooth Convex Optimization with Unbounded Gradients

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15522v1
• Date: Fri, 15 May 2026 01:43:22 GMT
• Title: Stochastic Non-Smooth Convex Optimization with Unbounded Gradients
• Abstract summary: We show that clipped AdamW is theoretically better than other popular optimization methods, such as SGDW and AdaGrad.<n>We also establish the critical role of AdamW's exponentially weighted accumulation, as opposed to simple averaging.
• Score: 10.350093268971836
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Much of the existing theory on first-order non-smooth optimization is built on a restrictive assumption that the gradients of the objective function are uniformly bounded. We introduce a much more realistic class of generalized Lipschitz functions, where the gradient norms are bounded by an affine function of the optimality gap. We then ask a natural question: what algorithm achieves the best global convergence rates for solving convex stochastic generalized Lipschitz optimization problems? To address this, we develop a new convergence analysis for several existing algorithms and find that AdamW with clipped updates, theoretically outperforms other popular stochastic optimization methods, such as SGD and AdaGrad. Moreover, our analysis establishes the critical role of AdamW's exponentially weighted gradient accumulation, as opposed to simple averaging. We further show that clipped AdamW is universal and achieves improved rates under the popular generalized smoothness assumption, analyze the convergence of clipped AdamW with diagonal and matrix preconditioners, and extend our results to the quasar-convex setting.

Related papers

• Towards Weaker Variance Assumptions for Stochastic Optimization [19.339358874690568]
  We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the subgradient is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization variable.<n>We analyze convex problems with functional constraints or regularized convex-concave min-max problems.<n>We obtain rates for optimality measures that do not require boundedness of the feasible set.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2025-04-14T07:26:34Z)
• Adaptive Gradient Normalization and Independent Sampling for (Stochastic) Generalized-Smooth Optimization [23.962901840695462]
  We show that existing algorithms are not fully adapted to generalized nonsmooth geometry.<n>Experiments show the fast convergence of sampling problems with our algorithm.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-17T21:52:00Z)
• Stochastic Zeroth-Order Optimization under Strongly Convexity and Lipschitz Hessian: Minimax Sample Complexity [59.75300530380427]
  We consider the problem of optimizing second-order smooth and strongly convex functions where the algorithm is only accessible to noisy evaluations of the objective function it queries. We provide the first tight characterization for the rate of the minimax simple regret by developing matching upper and lower bounds.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-06-28T02:56:22Z)
• Convergence of Adam Under Relaxed Assumptions [72.24779199744954]
  We show that Adam converges to $epsilon$-stationary points with $O(epsilon-4)$ gradient complexity under far more realistic conditions. We also propose a variance-reduced version of Adam with an accelerated gradient complexity of $O(epsilon-3)$.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-04-27T06:27:37Z)
• Zeroth-Order Hybrid Gradient Descent: Towards A Principled Black-Box Optimization Framework [100.36569795440889]
  This work is on the iteration of zero-th-order (ZO) optimization which does not require first-order information. We show that with a graceful design in coordinate importance sampling, the proposed ZO optimization method is efficient both in terms of complexity as well as as function query cost.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-21T17:29:58Z)
• Recent Theoretical Advances in Non-Convex Optimization [56.88981258425256]
  Motivated by recent increased interest in analysis of optimization algorithms for non- optimization in deep networks and other problems in data, we give an overview of recent results of theoretical optimization algorithms for non- optimization.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-12-11T08:28:51Z)
• Convergence of adaptive algorithms for weakly convex constrained optimization [59.36386973876765]
  We prove the $mathcaltilde O(t-1/4)$ rate of convergence for the norm of the gradient of Moreau envelope. Our analysis works with mini-batch size of $1$, constant first and second order moment parameters, and possibly smooth optimization domains.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-06-11T17:43:19Z)
• The Strength of Nesterov's Extrapolation in the Individual Convergence of Nonsmooth Optimization [0.0]
  We prove that Nesterov's extrapolation has the strength to make the individual convergence of gradient descent methods optimal for nonsmooth problems. We give an extension of the derived algorithms to solve regularized learning tasks with nonsmooth losses in settings. Our method is applicable as an efficient tool for solving large-scale $l$1-regularized hinge-loss learning problems.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-06-08T03:35:41Z)
• Adaptive First-and Zeroth-order Methods for Weakly Convex Stochastic Optimization Problems [12.010310883787911]
  We analyze a new family of adaptive subgradient methods for solving an important class of weakly convex (possibly nonsmooth) optimization problems. Experimental results indicate how the proposed algorithms empirically outperform its zerothorder gradient descent and its design variant.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-19T07:44:52Z)
• Towards Better Understanding of Adaptive Gradient Algorithms in Generative Adversarial Nets [71.05306664267832]
  Adaptive algorithms perform gradient updates using the history of gradients and are ubiquitous in training deep neural networks. In this paper we analyze a variant of OptimisticOA algorithm for nonconcave minmax problems. Our experiments show that adaptive GAN non-adaptive gradient algorithms can be observed empirically.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2019-12-26T22:10:10Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.