English

Solving Convex-Concave Problems with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4/(3p+1)})$ $p$th-Order Oracle Complexity

Optimization and Control 2026-04-22 v1

Abstract

When the objective has Lipschitz continuous ppth-order derivatives, it is known that convex-concave minimax problems can be solved with O(ϵ2/(p+1))\mathcal{O}(\epsilon^{-2/(p+1)}) ppth-order oracle calls. This complexity upper bound was speculated to be optimal as it is achieved by a natural generalization of the optimal first-order method. In this work, we show an improved upper bound of O~(ϵ4/(3p+1))\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4/(3p+1)}) by applying the Monteiro-Svaiter acceleration. We also establish a lower complexity bound of Ω(ϵ2/(3p1))\Omega(\epsilon^{-2/(3p-1)}), suggesting a gap still exists for p2p \ge 2.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.19462,
  title  = {Solving Convex-Concave Problems with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-4/(3p+1)})$ $p$th-Order Oracle Complexity},
  author = {Lesi Chen and Xinliang Zhang and Chengchang Liu and Junru Li and Luo Luo and Jingzhao Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19462},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

A preliminary version [arXiv:2506.08362] of this paper, with a subset of the results that are presented here, was published at COLT 2025;

R2 v1 2026-07-01T12:28:22.135Z