Title
Understanding generalization error of SGD in nonconvex optimization
Abstract
The success of deep learning has led to a rising interest in the generalization property of the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method, and stability is one popular approach to study it. Existing generalization bounds based on stability do not incorporate the interplay between the optimization of SGD and the underlying data distribution, and hence cannot even capture the effect of randomized labels on the generalization performance. In this paper, we establish generalization error bounds for SGD by characterizing the corresponding stability in terms of the on-average variance of the stochastic gradients. Such characterizations lead to improved bounds on the generalization error of SGD and experimentally explain the effect of the random labels on the generalization performance. We also study the regularized risk minimization problem with strongly convex regularizers, and obtain improved generalization error bounds for the proximal SGD.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1007/s10994-021-06056-w
MACHINE LEARNING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Generalization error, Stochastic gradient descent, Nonconvex machine learning
Journal
111
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
0885-6125
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yi Zhou16517.55
Yingbin Liang21646147.64
Huishuai Zhang33412.56