Can we use decreasing step size to replace mini-batch in SGD?
Generally answer is "it's not known". Similarity of effects of increasing minibatches size and decreasing learning rate is mostly empirical, there is no known asymptotic formula for it. Also effect of small LR and big minibatch is not the same. For example batch normalization layer would act completely different on those two approaches. Probabilistic distribution of gradients produced by minibatches and single sample (or mb of significantly different size) would be also quite different