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Stochastic subgradient method converges on tame functions. (English) Zbl 1433.65141
Summary: This work considers the question: what convergence guarantees does the stochastic subgradient method have in the absence of smoothness and convexity? We prove that the stochastic subgradient method, on any semialgebraic locally Lipschitz function, produces limit points that are all first-order stationary. More generally, our result applies to any function with a Whitney stratifiable graph. In particular, this work endows the stochastic subgradient method, and its proximal extension, with rigorous convergence guarantees for a wide class of problems arising in data science—including all popular deep learning architectures.

##### MSC:
 65L20 Stability and convergence of numerical methods for ordinary differential equations 34A60 Ordinary differential inclusions 60H10 Stochastic ordinary differential equations (aspects of stochastic analysis)
##### Software:
PyTorch; TensorFlow
Full Text:
##### References:
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