 Solution

The printed distance needs a square. The native PDF, paper page 3, prints $\Vert x^0-x^{\ast }\Vert$ in the final bound, but the general conclusion from (5) contains $\Vert x^0-x^{\ast }{\Vert }^2$. We first prove the corrected statement and then show that the printed version can fail.

Take the expectation in (5), use the tower property, and sum over $j=0,\dots ,k-1$. The squared Euclidean distances form a telescoping sum:Discard the final nonnegative squared Euclidean distance. The smallest of $k$ numbers is at most their arithmetic mean, soThis is an $O(k^{-1})$ bound above the stochastic gradient noise floor $M/L$ for the best expected objective function value. By Jensen's inequality, it also bounds $\mathbb{E}f({\bar{X}}^k)-f(x^{\ast })$ for the averaged iterate ${\bar{X}}^k=k^{-1}{\sum }_{j=0}^{k-1}{X}^{j+1}$, because $f$ is a convex function.

To test the printed version, take one component function, $f_1(x)=f(x)=x^2/4$, with $L=1$, $x^{\ast }=0$ and $x^0=10$. This convex quadratic function has $\nabla f(x)=x/2$, hence it has a $1$-Lipschitz gradient. The stochastic gradient descent update is deterministic, its conditional variance is zero, and the assumed positive bound $M=1/10$ is valid. At $k=1$, the new iterate is $X^1=5$, soThus the printed inequality is false under its stated assumptions. The squared Euclidean distance in the corrected bound resolves the defect.