As a simple and efficient optimization method in deep learning, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has attracted tremendous attention. In the vanishing learning rate regime, SGD is now relatively well understood, and the majority of theoretical approaches to SGD set their assumptions in the continuous-time limit. However, the continuous-time predictions are unlikely to reflect the experimental observations well because the practice often runs in the large learning rate regime, where the training is faster and the generalization of models are often better. In this paper, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus is on deriving exactly solvable results and relating them to experimental observations. The main contributions of this work are to derive the stable distribution for discrete-time SGD in a quadratic loss function with and without momentum. Examples of applications of the proposed theory considered in this work include the approximation error of variants of SGD, the effect of mini-batch noise, the escape rate from a sharp minimum, and and the stationary distribution of a few second order methods.

本文探究了随机梯度下降（SGD）及其变种在非消失学习率模式下的基本性质，特别是推导了离散时间SGD在二次损失函数中的稳态分布，讨论了其影响，并考虑了SGD变体的逼近误差、小批量噪音效应、最优贝叶斯推断、从尖锐最小值的逃逸率和几种包括阻尼牛顿法、自然梯度下降和Adam的二阶方法的稳态协方差等应用。

有限学习率随机梯度下降的噪声与波动