The classical analysis of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with polynomially decaying stepsize $\eta_t = \eta/\sqrt{t}$ relies on well-tuned $\eta$ depending on problem parameters such as Lipschitz smoothness constant, which is often unknown in practice. In this work, we prove that SGD with arbitrary $\eta > 0$, referred to as untuned SGD, still attains an order-optimal convergence rate $\widetilde{O}(T^{-1/4})$ in terms of gradient norm for minimizing smooth objectives. Unfortunately, it comes at the expense of a catastrophic exponential dependence on the smoothness constant, which we show is unavoidable for this scheme even in the noiseless setting. We then examine three families of adaptive methods $\unicode{x2013}$ Normalized SGD (NSGD), AMSGrad, and AdaGrad $\unicode{x2013}$ unveiling their power in preventing such exponential dependency in the absence of information about the smoothness parameter and boundedness of stochastic gradients. Our results provide theoretical justification for the advantage of adaptive methods over untuned SGD in alleviating the issue with large gradients.

本文探讨了随机梯度下降法与多项式衰减步长之间的关系，并证明无调谐的随机梯度下降法具有渐进最优的收敛速率，但需要面临指数级的平滑度常数；而规范化SGD、AMSGrad和AdaGrad方法可以在不知道平滑度参数和随机梯度边界条件的情况下消除梯度爆炸问题。

一枚硬币的两面：未调节的 SGD 的局限性和自适应方法的威力