Sharp Stationary Gaussian Approximation for Constant-Stepsize SGD

arXiv:2609.39144 · cs.LG, math.OC · Submitted 2026-09-30 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, math.OC

Submitted: 2026-09-30

Updated: 2026-10-01

Comments: To be presented at 2026 NeurIPS workshop on "Optimization for Machine Learning" (OPT2026)

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We prove a sharp Gaussian approximation for the invariant law of constant-stepsize SGD with bounded additive noise generated by an exogenous uniformly ergodic Markov chain.

Abstract

We prove a sharp Gaussian approximation for the invariant law of constant-stepsize SGD with bounded additive noise generated by an exogenous uniformly ergodic Markov chain. For a smooth, strongly convex objective with a Lipschitz Hessian and nondegenerate long-run noise covariance, the centered iterate normalized by the square root of the stepsize is O(sqrtα) -close in 1-Wasserstein distance to its limiting Gaussian. The proof combines blockwise Gaussian comparison with long-run contraction. A four-state example gives a matching lower bound although the one-time noise marginal is symmetric and every nonzero-lag autocovariance vanishes. In this example, an adjacent third-order mixed moment produces the leading correction.

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