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Convex SGD: Generalization Without Early Stopping

Abstract

We consider the generalization error associated with stochastic gradient descent on a smooth convex function over a compact set. We show the first bound on the generalization error that vanishes when the number of iterations TT and the dataset size nn go to zero at arbitrary rates; our bound scales as O~(1/T+1/n)\tilde{O}(1/\sqrt{T} + 1/\sqrt{n}) with step-size αt=1/t\alpha_t = 1/\sqrt{t}. In particular, strong convexity is not needed for stochastic gradient descent to generalize well.

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