High-dimensional Limit of SGD for Diagonal Linear Networks

Abstract: Understanding the behavior of stochastic gradient methods is a central problem in modern machine learning. Recent work has highlighted diagonal linear networks as a simplified yet expressive setting for analyzing the optimization and generalization properties of neural models. In this work, we show that in the high-dimensional regime, stochastic gradient descent on diagonal linear networks is well-approximated by continuous dynamics governed by a stochastic differential equation (SDE), which explicitly decouples the drift from the gradient noise. We further derive a deterministic partial differential equation whose solution propagates the relevant state of the iterates and characterizes the time evolution of a broad class of observable statistics, including the risk, curvature, and other metrics for optimality. Finally, we show that, under a suitable parametrization, the stochastic dynamics are globally well posed and converge exponentially fast to zero risk with high probability, yielding a fully explicit non-asymptotic description of their long-time behavior. Numerical simulations corroborate our theoretical findings.