A Language and Smoothed Semantics for Convergent Stochastic Gradient Descent
summary
Provides a smoothed denotational semantics (in Frölicher spaces) plus a mild type system forbidding parameter-dependent guards that ensures any typable real-valued program reduces to piecewise polynomials with recorded branch constraints; replaces indicator jumps by tunable sigmoids and computes gradients with a backward-mode AD variant that tracks constraints. For each fixed smoothing the Monte‑Carlo gradient estimator is unbiased and gradients converge uniformly, and a diagonalization SGD that increases accuracy over iterations provably yields stationary accumulation points (or diverges). Ongoing experiments; no recursion yet.
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chapters (5)
- 0:00Start
- 2:16Stochastic Gradient Descent
- 2:27Primarization Gradient Estimator Is Biased for Non-Differentiable Models
- 4:17Programming Language
- 5:43Type System
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