Papers › Stochastic Gradient Variance Reduction by Solving a Filtering Problem

Stochastic Gradient Variance Reduction by Solving a Filtering Problem

22 Dec 2020arXiv:2012.12418archive 2025-07-28

Xingyi Yang

Deep neural networks (DNN) are typically optimized using stochastic gradient descent (SGD). However, the estimation of the gradient using stochastic samples tends to be noisy and unreliable, resulting in large gradient variance and bad convergence. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Filter Gradient Decent}~(FGD), an efficient stochastic optimization algorithm that makes the consistent estimation of the local gradient by solving an adaptive filtering problem with different design of filters. Our method reduces variance in stochastic gradient descent by incorporating the historical states to enhance the current estimation. It is able to correct noisy gradient direction as well as to accelerate the convergence of learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Filter Gradient Descent on numerical optimization and training neural networks, where it achieves superior and robust performance compared with traditional momentum-based methods. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to provide a practical solution that integrates filtering into gradient estimation by making the analogy between gradient estimation and filtering problems in signal processing. (The code is provided in https://github.com/Adamdad/Filter-Gradient-Decent)

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

Adamdad/Filter-Gradient-Decent officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Stochastic Optimization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections