NeurIPS 2020

Stability of Stochastic Gradient Descent on Nonsmooth Convex Losses


Meta Review

This paper got high scores: 9,7,6,8, all with high confidence. The major concerns are from Reviewer #3, who asked about the relationship with "Fine-Grained Analysis of Stability and Generalization for Stochastic Gradient Descent" ([*]) and whether the technique of using Poisson sampling in [1] can be used in the current work which uses uniform sampling. While the authors clarified in the rebuttal that their work is stronger than [*] and some of the results in [*] may not be generalized to the case in the current paper, and the technique in [1] can be applied straightforwardly, Reviewer #3 further refuted on the first claim and doubted on the second claim during discussion. The AC confirmed that this paper is concurrent with [*] and deemed that Reviewer #3 may have missed the sketched proof in the "Privacy Analysis" section of the rebuttal. During further discussion, Reviewer #3 acknowledged that the sketched proof made sense and supported acceptance. Reviewer #1 echoed. So the AC recommended acceptance.