Convergence Analysis of Randomized Subspace Normalized SGD under Heavy-Tailed Noise

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Authors: Gaku Omiya, Pierre‐Louis Poirion, Akiko Takeda
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Randomized subspace methods reduce per-iteration cost; however, in nonconvex optimization, most analyses are expectation-based, and high-probability bounds remain scarce even under sub-Gaussian noise. We first prove that randomized subspace SGD (RS-SGD) admits a high-probability convergence bound under sub-Gaussian noise, achieving the same order of oracle complexity as prior in-expectation results. Motivated by the prevalence of heavy-tailed gradients in modern machine learning, we then propose randomized subspace normalized SGD (RS-NSGD), which integrates direction normalization into subspace updates. Assuming the noise has bounded $p$-th moments, we establish both in-expectation and high-probability convergence guarantees, and show that RS-NSGD can achieve better oracle complexity than full-dimensional normalized SGD.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Stochastic Gradient Optimization Techniques Advanced Optimization Algorithms Research Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems

Publication details

Journal / source
arXiv (Cornell University)
Publication date
28 January 2026
Document type
Preprint