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This research establishes that Stochastic Mirror Descent retains convergence guarantees even under heavy-tailed noise with infinite variance, provided the noise process has finite $p$-th order moments. By modeling the algorithm as a continuous-time Lévy mirror flow, the authors derive explicit bounds on the time required to reach $\epsilon$-optimality despite jump discontinuities in the trajectory. These theoretical findings offer a robust framework for optimizing non-smooth objectives in environments prone to extreme outliers, bridging the gap between singular stochastic dynamics and practical discrete-time implementations.
Bregman meets L\'evy: Stochastic mirror descent with heavy-tailed noise in continuous and discrete time
arXiv:2606.03769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the robustness of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under heavy-tailed noise, focusing on whether the method retains its convergence guarantees when run with infinite-variance stochastic gradient input. To address this question in a principled manner, we begin by introducing a continuous-time model of SMD as a stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven by a centered L\'evy noise process with finite $p$-th order moments, $1 < p \leq 2$. This scheme -- which we call the L\'evy mirror flow (LMF) -- arises naturally as the scaling limit of SMD in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In particular, when $p < 2$ -- the heavy noise regime -- the trajectories of LMF generically exhibit jump discontinuities of arbitrary magnitude which, if frequent enough, lead to infinite variance. Nonetheless, despite this highly singular behavior, we show that LMF attains $\epsilon$-optimality within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-p/(p-1)})$ time in the convex case, and within $\mathcal{\tilde O}(\epsilon^{-1/(p-1)})$ time for (relatively) strongly convex objectives. These guarantees provide a transparent characterization of the impact of frequent long jumps on the convergence of the process, and percolate to a series of matching discrete-time guarantees for several variants of SMD under heavy-tailed noise.
Abstract:We study the robustness of stochastic mirror descent (SMD) under heavy-tailed noise, focusing on whether the method retains its convergence guarantees when run with infinite-variance stochastic gradient input. To address this question in a principled manner, we begin by introducing a continuous-time model of SMD as a stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven by a centered Lévy noise process with finite $p$-th order moments, $1 < p \leq 2$. This scheme -- which we call the Lévy mirror flow (LMF) -- arises naturally as the scaling limit of SMD in the presence of heavy-tailed noise. In particular, when $p < 2$ -- the heavy noise regime -- the trajectories of LMF generically exhibit jump discontinuities of arbitrary magnitude which, if frequent enough, lead to infinite variance. Nonetheless, despite this highly singular behavior, we show that LMF attains $\epsilon$-optimality within $\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-p/(p-1)})$ time in the convex case, and within $\mathcal{\tilde O}(\epsilon^{-1/(p-1)})$ time for (relatively) strongly convex objectives. These guarantees provide a transparent characterization of the impact of frequent long jumps on the convergence of the process, and percolate to a series of matching discrete-time guarantees for several variants of SMD under heavy-tailed noise.
Optimization and Control (math.OC); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Probability (math.PR)
arXiv:2606.03769 [math.OC]
(or arXiv:2606.03769v1 [math.OC] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.03769 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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