Benefits of Early Stopping in Gradient Descent for Overparameterized Logistic Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wu, Jingfeng, Bartlett, Peter, Telgarsky, Matus, Yu, Bin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Wu, Jingfeng
Bartlett, Peter
Telgarsky, Matus
Yu, Bin
author_facet Wu, Jingfeng
Bartlett, Peter
Telgarsky, Matus
Yu, Bin
contents In overparameterized logistic regression, gradient descent (GD) iterates diverge in norm while converging in direction to the maximum $\ell_2$-margin solution -- a phenomenon known as the implicit bias of GD. This work investigates additional regularization effects induced by early stopping in well-specified high-dimensional logistic regression. We first demonstrate that the excess logistic risk vanishes for early-stopped GD but diverges to infinity for GD iterates at convergence. This suggests that early-stopped GD is well-calibrated, whereas asymptotic GD is statistically inconsistent. Second, we show that to attain a small excess zero-one risk, polynomially many samples are sufficient for early-stopped GD, while exponentially many samples are necessary for any interpolating estimator, including asymptotic GD. This separation underscores the statistical benefits of early stopping in the overparameterized regime. Finally, we establish nonasymptotic bounds on the norm and angular differences between early-stopped GD and $\ell_2$-regularized empirical risk minimizer, thereby connecting the implicit regularization of GD with explicit $\ell_2$-regularization.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_13283
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benefits of Early Stopping in Gradient Descent for Overparameterized Logistic Regression
Wu, Jingfeng
Bartlett, Peter
Telgarsky, Matus
Yu, Bin
Machine Learning
In overparameterized logistic regression, gradient descent (GD) iterates diverge in norm while converging in direction to the maximum $\ell_2$-margin solution -- a phenomenon known as the implicit bias of GD. This work investigates additional regularization effects induced by early stopping in well-specified high-dimensional logistic regression. We first demonstrate that the excess logistic risk vanishes for early-stopped GD but diverges to infinity for GD iterates at convergence. This suggests that early-stopped GD is well-calibrated, whereas asymptotic GD is statistically inconsistent. Second, we show that to attain a small excess zero-one risk, polynomially many samples are sufficient for early-stopped GD, while exponentially many samples are necessary for any interpolating estimator, including asymptotic GD. This separation underscores the statistical benefits of early stopping in the overparameterized regime. Finally, we establish nonasymptotic bounds on the norm and angular differences between early-stopped GD and $\ell_2$-regularized empirical risk minimizer, thereby connecting the implicit regularization of GD with explicit $\ell_2$-regularization.
title Benefits of Early Stopping in Gradient Descent for Overparameterized Logistic Regression
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13283