Convergence of Clipped SGD on Convex $(L_0,L_1)$-Smooth Functions

Ofir Gaash, Kfir Y. Levy, Yair Carmon

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

We study stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with gradient clipping on convex functions under a generalized smoothness assumption called $(L_0,L_1)$-smoothness. Using gradient clipping, we establish a high probability convergence rate that matches the SGD rate in the $L$ smooth case up to polylogarithmic factors and additive terms. We also propose a variation of adaptive SGD with gradient clipping, which achieves the same guarantee. We perform empirical experiments to examine our theory and algorithmic choices.