High-Probability Bounds for SGD under the Polyak-Lojasiewicz Condition with Markovian Noise

We study first-order methods for smooth objectives satisfying the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition when gradient samples are generated by an exogenous Markov chain. In the light-tailed setting, prior uniform-in-time high-probability bounds for ordinary Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) under a standard growth envelope scale as $\widetilde{O}(t_{mix}^2/k)$, leaving a gap with the $\widetilde{O}(t_{mix}/k)$ expectation bounds. We close this gap using a lag-blocking argument to establish a uniform high-probability guarantee with a leading stochastic term of $\widetilde{O}(t_{mix}/(k+K_0))$ under geometric mixing. We prove this linear dependence on the mixing time is optimal via a matching $Ω(σ^2 t_{mix}/k)$ lower bound on a quadratic objective driven by a persistent two-state chain. We then extend this framework to heavy-tailed Markovian gradients satisfying a stationary finite-$p$-moment condition, $p \in (1,2]$. We design an all-samples clipped block method that uses every Markov transition while mitigating Markovian bias. Under a transition budget $T$, this algorithm achieves a high-probability stochastic error of $\widetilde{O}(σ_p^2(t_{mix}/T)^{2(p-1)/p})$. We establish a matching lower bound by reducing PL optimization to heavy-tailed mean estimation for a sticky Markov chain. Ultimately, this work tightly characterizes the optimal polynomial dependence on mixing time for light-tailed PL-SGD, and the optimal heavy-tail exponent and effective-sample-size dependence in the robust regime.

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is widely used to train machine learning models, but subsampling the training data introduces noise into its updates. The strength and applicability of high-probability guarantees therefore depend critically on how the tails of gradient noise are modeled. Reports of heavy-tailed gradient noise in deep learning motivate relaxing the bounded-noise and sub-Gaussian assumptions commonly used in high-probability analyses of SGD. We use Young functions from Orlicz space theory to describe noise tails in a common framework. We model SGD gradient noise by adopting a Young function that preserves the finiteness of all polynomial moments while allowing tails heavier than sub-Weibull, including lognormal distributions. The resulting class is called $β$-heavy-tailed, with $β$ controlling the tail heaviness. We establish concentration inequalities for $β$-heavy-tailed noise and combine them with a uniform bound on the difference between empirical and population gradients along the SGD trajectory to obtain high-probability bounds on optimization and population-risk stationarity for smooth nonconvex losses under trajectory assumptions. The bounds are not restricted to a particular learning-rate decay rule and make explicit the effects of noise tails and learning-rate schedules. Under the Polyak-Łojasiewicz condition, we bound the risk at the last iterate. We also analyze SGD with gradient clipping under the $β$-heavy-tailed noise model.

Decentralized stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD) is an efficient method for large-scale distributed learning. Existing generalization studies mainly address expected results, achieving rates limited to $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{δ\sqrt{mn}}\right)$, where $δ$ is the confidence parameter, $m$ the number of workers, and $n$ the sample size. When $m=1$, D-SGD reduces to traditional SGD, whose optimal high-probability generalization bound is $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{n}}\log (1/δ)\right)$. This discrepancy reveals a gap between high-probability guarantees for SGD and those for D-SGD. To close this, we develop a high-probability learning theory for D-SGD, aiming for the optimal $\mathcal{O}\left(\frac{1}{\sqrt{mn}}\log (1/δ)\right)$ rate. We refine bounds for D-SGD using pointwise uniform stability in distributed learning-a weaker notion than uniform stability-and analyze them across convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings. We also provide high-probability results for gradient-based measures in non-convex cases where only local minima exist, and derive optimization error and excess risk bounds. Finally, accounting for communication overhead, we analyze generalization bounds for local models within time-varying frameworks.