Quantitative Fluctuation Analysis for Continuous-Time Stochastic Gradient Descent via Malliavin Calculus

Abstract

In this paper, we establish a Quantitative Central Limit Theorem ({\sc qclt}) for the Stochastic Gradient Descent in Continuous Time ({\sc sgdct}) algorithm, whose parameter updates are governed by a stochastic differential equation. We derive an explicit rate at which the {\sc sgdct} iterates converge, in the Wasserstein metric, to a critical point of the objective function. This rate is driven primarily by the magnitude of the learning rate: for a fixed convexity constant of the objective function, smaller learning rates lead to slower convergence. Our approach relies on tools from Malliavin calculus. In particular, we apply a second-order Poincar\'e inequality and obtain explicit bounds by estimating the first- and second-order Malliavin derivatives separately. Controlling the second-order derivative requires several delicate calculations and a careful sequence of decompositions in order to achieve sharp estimates. We complement the theoretical results with several numerical experiments that illustrate the predicted convergence behavior.