activity
20242026
collaborators

9 papers

math.OC2026

Optimal Asymptotic Rates for (Stochastic) Gradient Descent under the Local PL-Condition: A Geometric Approach

Sebastian Kassing, Thomas Kruse

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been studied extensively over the past decades due to its simplicity and broad applicability in machine learning. In this work, we analyze the…

cs.LG2026

The Role of Target Update Frequencies in Q-Learning

Simon Weissmann, Tilman Aach, Benedikt Wille +2

The target network update frequency (TUF) is a central stabilization mechanism in (deep) Q-learning. However, their selection remains poorly understood and is often treated merely…

cs.LG2026

An Approximate Ascent Approach To Prove Convergence of PPO

Leif Doering, Daniel Schmidt, Moritz Melcher +4

Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is among the most widely used deep reinforcement learning algorithms, yet its theoretical foundations remain incomplete. Most importantly, conver…

math.OC2026

Polyak's Heavy Ball Method Achieves Accelerated Local Rate of Convergence under Polyak-Lojasiewicz Inequality

Sebastian Kassing, Simon Weissmann

In this work, we analyze the convergence of Polyak's heavy ball method in both continuous and discrete time for non-convex -objective functions satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewi…

math.OC2025

ODE approximation for the Adam algorithm: General and overparametrized setting

Steffen Dereich, Arnulf Jentzen, Sebastian Kassing

The Adam optimizer is currently presumably the most popular optimization method in deep learning. In this article we develop an ODE based method to study the Adam optimizer in a fa…

math.OC2025

Controlling the Flow: Stability and Convergence for Stochastic Gradient Descent with Decaying Regularization

Sebastian Kassing, Simon Weissmann, Leif Döring

The present article studies the minimization of convex, L-smooth functions defined on a separable real Hilbert space. We analyze regularized stochastic gradient descent (reg-SGD),…