arXiv:2602.13906stat.MLcs.LG2026-02

用递归高斯近似随机逼近迭代的有限时间分布,给出可证明的误差界。

How Accurately Can a Gaussian Approximate Stochastic Approximation Iterates?

  • 用递归定义协方差的高斯序列近似迭代分布
  • 在多种步长下给出 Wasserstein-1 距离的显式上界
  • 方法可推广至采样问题,适合理论研究者

随机逼近(SA)用于求解受噪声扰动算子的根。本文关注有限时间内 SA 迭代的分布性质。由于精确分布难以刻画,目标是寻找能提供有用尾部界的有效近似。受渐近正态性文献启发,我们用一组协方差递归定义的高斯分布近似非极限分布。具体地,对多种步长选择,建立了时间 k 处缩放后迭代与对应高斯分布之间 Wasserstein-1 距离的显式上界。由于这些协方差收敛到经典渐近极限,本分析也附带给出了渐近正态性的收敛速率。作为直接推论,我们获得了任意时刻 SA 迭代误差的尾部界。最后,通过匹配下界证明了率的最优性,并通过模拟验证了结果。关键思路是先研究由一般噪声驱动的离散 Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (O-U) 过程的收敛速率,其平稳分布与缩放后 SA 迭代的极限高斯分布相同。该过程分析结合了 Stein 法处理矩阵加权独立同分布随机变量,而 SA 的有限时间界则通过刻画缩放后迭代与离散 O-U 过程之间的误差动态并结合后者收敛速率得到。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Stochastic approximation (SA) is a method for finding the root of an operator perturbed by noise. The focus of this paper is studying the distribution of SA iterates in finite time. In general, it is not possible to characterize the exact distribution, and therefore our goal is to find an approximation which can yield useful tail bounds. Inspired by the rich literature on the asymptotic normality of rescaled SA iterates, we approximate the pre-limit distributions by a sequence of Gaussians whose covariance is recursively defined. In particular, we establish explicit bounds on the Wasserstein-1 distance between the rescaled iterate at time $k$ and the aforementioned Gaussian for various choices of step-sizes. Since these covariances converge to the classical asymptotic limit, our analysis also provides a convergence rate for asymptotic normality as a by-product. As an immediate consequence of our bounds, we obtain tail bounds on the error of SA iterates at any time. Finally, we establish the sharpness of our rates by providing matching lower bounds and validate our findings through simulations. We obtain the sharp rates by first studying the convergence rate of the discrete Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (O-U) process driven by general noise, whose stationary distribution is identical to the limiting Gaussian distribution of the rescaled SA iterates. We believe that this is of independent interest, given its connection to sampling literature. The analysis involves adapting Stein's method for Gaussian approximation to handle the matrix weighted sum of i.i.d. random variables. The desired finite-time bounds for SA are obtained by characterizing the error dynamics between the rescaled SA iterate and the discrete time O-U process and combining it with the convergence rate of the latter process.

随机逼近高斯近似概率界理论分析

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