2020

On the Convergence of SGD with Biased Gradients

Ajalloeian, Ahmad, Stich, Sebastian U.

Understand

We analyze the complexity of biased stochastic gradient methods (SGD), where individual updates are corrupted by deterministic, i.e.

  • biased error terms.
  • We derive convergence results for smooth (non-convex) functions and give improved rates under the Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition.
  • We quantify how the magnitude of the bias impacts the attainable accuracy and the convergence rates (sometimes leading to divergence).

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