Functional Central Limit Theorem for Stochastic Gradient Descent

For stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with a constant stepsize $α$, the invariant law of the iterates, centered at a minimizer, describes the behavior of the algorithm over long time horizons. In the strongly convex case, this invariant law has the familiar $\sqrtα$ scaling and a Gaussian limit as $α\downarrow 0$. We show that this behavior changes fundamentally for convex objectives $H$ with flat minima and (sub)quadratic tails. More specifically, we study SGD with Markovian noise generated by a contractive driving chain. For every sufficiently small constant stepsize $α$, we prove existence, uniqueness, and geometric convergence to an augmented invariant law in a Wasserstein distance induced by an $α$-dependent metric. When the minimizer $x_\star$ has local flatness exponent $m\ge2$, meaning that $\nabla^2 H(x)\asymp \lVert x-x_\star\rVert^{m-2} I_d$ as $x\to x_\star$, we obtain a contraction bound with factor $1-cα^{m-1}$, where $c>0$ is a constant. This recovers the factor $1-cα$ in the quadratic case $m=2$. We then analyze the small-stepsize scaling limit. We show that the invariant law concentrates on the scale $α^{1/m}$ and that the rescaled iterates converge weakly to the stationary distribution of the stochastic differential equation $dY_t=-h_0(Y_t)\,dt+Σ^{1/2}\,dB_t ,$ where $h_0$ is the limiting drift at the minimizer and $Σ$ denotes the asymptotic covariance. This recovers the Gaussian limit when $m=2$ and gives generally non-Gaussian stationary limits in the flat case $m>2$. Finally, we give corresponding results for coordinate-separable objectives with unequal flatness exponents.

This paper develops strong Gaussian approximations (KMT type) for constant learning rate stochastic gradient descent (SGD). We work with heavy tailed noise and assume that the number of iterates grows and the learning rate shrinks simultaneously. Our work constructs simple Gaussian processes on the same space and bounds, in probability, the maximum difference between the SGD errors and their respective limits. While there exist central limit theorems for constant rate SGD centered at the optimum, these only provide individual iterate inference. By contrast, our quenched KMT approximations allow for finite sample, simultaneous, whole-trajectory-level inference and imply stochastic process convergence (Functional Central Limit Theorems (FCLTs)). For accumulated errors centered at the true optimum, we first obtain a KMT-type approximation bound when the learning rate scales as $γ_n=\frac{c}{\sqrt n}+o(n^{-1/2})$ for a constant $c \in \mathbb{R}^+$ and $n$ iterations. The result reveals a trade off between controlling the bias of SGD and the initialization effect, with no learning rate scaling generally making both contributions vanish in the accumulated error limit. To eliminate these contributions, we consider a Burn in scheme and Richardson-Romberg extrapolation and prove respective KMT and FCLT theorems. We also prove a finite-horizon KMT-type approximation and FCLT for the rescaled iterate trajectory to a stationary Ornstein--Uhlenbeck (OU) process. We consider applications in risk control and simultaneous inference and perform simulations to illustrate our results.

We study the time-uniform convergence of the raw iterate of standard stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for unconstrained smooth convex objectives. We prove that, under standard noise assumptions, the time-uniform convergence rate gets arbitrarily close to $\sqrt{\log n / n}$ but never reaches it. More specifically, we prove that for every positive, eventually nondecreasing sequence $h$ satisfying $h(n) = o(\sqrt{n})$, a bound of order $h(n)/\sqrt{n}$, holding simultaneously for all $n$ with probability at least $1-α$ and uniformly over the problem class, is achievable if and only if $$\sum_{j = 1}^{\infty} \frac{1}{h(2^j)^2} < \infty.$$ The constructive sufficiency result follows from a dyadic horizon-free schedule together with an additive conditional-restart inequality. The necessity counterpart applies to every deterministic nonnegative schedule and holds even for a one-dimensional analytic smooth convex objective with Gaussian noise.