Stochastic gradient algorithms are often unstable when applied to functions that do not have Lipschitz-continuous and/or bounded gradients. Gradient clipping is a simple and effective technique to stabilize the training process for problems that are prone to the exploding gradient problem. Despite its widespread popularity, the convergence properties of the gradient clipping heuristic are poorly understood, especially for stochastic problems. This paper establishes both qualitative and quantitative convergence results of the clipped stochastic (sub)gradient method (SGD) for non-smooth convex functions with rapidly growing subgradients. Our analyses show that clipping enhances the stability of SGD and that the clipped SGD algorithm enjoys finite convergence rates in many cases. We also study the convergence of a clipped method with momentum, which includes clipped SGD as a special case, for weakly convex problems under standard assumptions. With a novel Lyapunov analysis, we show that the proposed method achieves the best-known rate for the considered class of problems, demonstrating the effectiveness of clipped methods also in this regime. Numerical results confirm our theoretical developments.

本文提出了一种修剪随机梯度（子）梯度法（SGD）的收敛性研究，特别是对于具有快速增长次梯度的非光滑凸函数。研究表明，修剪对SGD的稳定性有益，并且修剪SGD算法在许多情况下具有有限的收敛速率。同时，我们还研究了带有动量的修剪方法的收敛性，并展示了新的Lyapunov分析证明了该方法在这类问题中具有最佳的收敛速率。数值结果验证了理论结果。

随机梯度剪裁的稳定性和收敛性: 超越Lipschitz连续性和平滑性