Stochastic Gradient Descent with Biased but Consistent Gradient Estimators

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD), which dates back to the 1950s, is one of the most popular and effective approaches for performing stochastic optimization. Research on SGD resurged recently in machine learning for optimizing convex loss functions as well as training nonconvex deep neural networks. The theory assumes that one can easily compute an unbiased gradient estimator, which is usually the case due to the sample average nature of empirical risk minimization. There exist, however, many scenarios (e.g., graph learning) where an unbiased estimator may be as expensive to compute as the full gradient, because training examples are interconnected. In a recent work, Chen et al. (2018) proposed using a consistent gradient estimator as an economic alternative. Encouraged by empirical success, we show, in a general setting, that consistent estimators result in the same convergence behavior as do unbiased ones. Our analysis covers strongly convex, convex, and nonconvex objectives. This work opens several new research directions, including the development of more efficient SGD updates with consistent estimators and the design of efficient training algorithms for large-scale graphs.