Improved Last-Iterate Convergence of Shuffling Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liu, Zijian, Zhou, Zhengyuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liu, Zijian
Zhou, Zhengyuan
author_facet Liu, Zijian
Zhou, Zhengyuan
contents We study the convergence of the shuffling gradient method, a popular algorithm employed to minimize the finite-sum function with regularization, in which functions are passed to apply (Proximal) Gradient Descent (GD) one by one whose order is determined by a permutation on the indices of functions. In contrast to its easy implementation and effective performance in practice, the theoretical understanding remains limited. A recent advance by (Liu & Zhou, 2024b) establishes the first last-iterate convergence results under various settings, especially proving the optimal rates for smooth (strongly) convex optimization. However, their bounds for nonsmooth (strongly) convex functions are only as fast as Proximal GD. In this work, we provide the first improved last-iterate analysis for the nonsmooth case demonstrating that the widely used Random Reshuffle ($\textsf{RR}$) and Single Shuffle ($\textsf{SS}$) strategies are both provably faster than Proximal GD, reflecting the benefit of randomness. As an important implication, we give the first (nearly) optimal convergence result for the suffix average under the $\textsf{RR}$ sampling scheme in the general convex case, matching the lower bound shown by (Koren et al., 2022).
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23056
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improved Last-Iterate Convergence of Shuffling Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization
Liu, Zijian
Zhou, Zhengyuan
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
We study the convergence of the shuffling gradient method, a popular algorithm employed to minimize the finite-sum function with regularization, in which functions are passed to apply (Proximal) Gradient Descent (GD) one by one whose order is determined by a permutation on the indices of functions. In contrast to its easy implementation and effective performance in practice, the theoretical understanding remains limited. A recent advance by (Liu & Zhou, 2024b) establishes the first last-iterate convergence results under various settings, especially proving the optimal rates for smooth (strongly) convex optimization. However, their bounds for nonsmooth (strongly) convex functions are only as fast as Proximal GD. In this work, we provide the first improved last-iterate analysis for the nonsmooth case demonstrating that the widely used Random Reshuffle ($\textsf{RR}$) and Single Shuffle ($\textsf{SS}$) strategies are both provably faster than Proximal GD, reflecting the benefit of randomness. As an important implication, we give the first (nearly) optimal convergence result for the suffix average under the $\textsf{RR}$ sampling scheme in the general convex case, matching the lower bound shown by (Koren et al., 2022).
title Improved Last-Iterate Convergence of Shuffling Gradient Methods for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23056