High Probability Analysis for Non-Convex Stochastic Optimization with
  Clipping
Shaojie Li Yong Liu
Gradient clipping is a commonly used technique to stabilize the training
process of neural networks. A growing body of studies has shown that gradient
clipping is a promising technique for dealing with the heavy-tailed behavior
that emerged in stochastic optimization as well. While gradient clipping is
significant, its theoretical guarantees are scarce. Most theoretical guarantees
only provide an in-expectation analysis and only focus on optimization
performance. In this paper, we provide high probability analysis in the
non-convex setting and derive the optimization bound and the generalization
bound simultaneously for popular stochastic optimization algorithms with
gradient clipping, including stochastic gradient descent and its variants of
momentum and adaptive stepsizes. With the gradient clipping, we study a
heavy-tailed assumption that the gradients only have bounded $\alpha$-th
moments for some $\alpha \in (1, 2]$, which is much weaker than the standard
bounded second-moment assumption. Overall, our study provides a relatively
complete picture for the theoretical guarantee of stochastic optimization
algorithms with clipping.