arXiv:2606.32005math.OCcs.LG2026-06

随机重排比随机梯度下降更优,理论首次证明其在任意步长下都更强。

Random Reshuffling Dominates Stochastic Gradient Descent

  • 提出新理论框架,证明随机重排在任意步长下均优于标准随机梯度下降
  • 突破传统限制:无需步长小于1/n,且在少于n个轮次时仍更优
  • 解决长期悬而未决的优化理论难题,适合优化算法研究者

随机梯度下降(SGD)是经典的优化算法,具有良好的理论保障。但实际中常采用随机重排(RR)策略,即对数据随机打乱后分批更新。尽管RR在实践中表现优异,长期缺乏理论支持。现有理论要求步长小于1/n,且当迭代轮次少于n时,其最优收敛率反而劣于SGD。本文首次证明,在平滑凸优化中,随机重排在任意合理步长和有限轮次后均优于标准SGD,彻底解决了这一长期存在的理论与实践脱节问题。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Stochastic Gradient Descent ($\textsf{SGD}$) is one of the most classical optimization algorithms with favorable theoretical guarantees, yet the practical implementation of $\textsf{SGD}$ differs subtly from its well-known form and is often referred to as Shuffling Stochastic Gradient Descent ($\textsf{Shuffling SGD}$). A particularly popular strategy in $\textsf{Shuffling SGD}$ is Random Reshuffling ($\textsf{RR}$), which has achieved great empirical success across numerous experiments. Despite its strong performance, $\textsf{RR}$ has long been considered a heuristic due to a lack of theoretical support. Over the last decade, people have finally established provable convergence rates for $\textsf{RR}$, thus justifying its observed superiority. However, for smooth convex optimization, two clouds over the convergence theory of $\textsf{RR}$ remain to this day. More precisely, according to the current theory, $\textsf{Shuffling SGD}$ under $\textsf{RR}$ converges only when the stepsize is smaller than a threshold proportional to $1/n$, where $n$ is the number of summands in the objective (or the number of data points). Consequently, the optimally tuned theoretical rate of $\textsf{Shuffling SGD}$ under $\textsf{RR}$ is strictly worse than that of $\textsf{SGD}$ when the number of epochs is smaller than another threshold proportional to $n$. These two restrictions heavily limit the applicability of existing theories and leave a critical mismatch with practice. In this work, for the first time, we prove that $\textsf{RR}$ dominates $\textsf{SGD}$ in smooth convex optimization under any reasonable stepsize after any finite number of epochs, thereby addressing a longstanding open question.

优化算法随机梯度理论分析

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