Related papers: Identifying and attacking the saddle point problem…
We consider the nonconvex minimization problem, with quartic objective function, that arises in the exact recovery of a configuration matrix $P\in \R^{nd}$ of $n$ points when a Euclidean distance matrix, \EDMp, is given with embedding…
In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality…
Deep Learning optimization involves minimizing a high-dimensional loss function in the weight space which is often perceived as difficult due to its inherent difficulties such as saddle points, local minima, ill-conditioning of the Hessian…
Gradient-based first-order convex optimization algorithms find widespread applicability in a variety of domains, including machine learning tasks. Motivated by the recent advances in fixed-time stability theory of continuous-time dynamical…
This paper addresses the optimization problem of minimizing non-convex continuous functions, which is relevant in the context of high-dimensional machine learning applications characterized by over-parametrization. We analyze a randomized…
This paper studies quasi-Newton methods for solving strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems (SPP). We propose greedy and random Broyden family updates for SPP, which have explicit local superlinear convergence rate of…
This paper studies the complexity of finding approximate stationary points for the smooth nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yf(x,y)$. Under the standard first-order smoothness conditions where $f$ is…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a standard optimization method to minimize a training error with respect to network parameters in modern neural network learning. However, it typically suffers from proliferation of saddle points in the…
The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…
This paper introduces a novel Homogeneous Second-order Descent Ascent (HSDA) algorithm for nonconvex-strongly concave minimax optimization problems. At each iteration, HSDA uniquely computes a search direction by solving a homogenized…
We establish that first-order methods avoid saddle points for almost all initializations. Our results apply to a wide variety of first-order methods, including gradient descent, block coordinate descent, mirror descent and variants thereof.…
In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete…
We develop a novel framework to study smooth and strongly convex optimization algorithms, both deterministic and stochastic. Focusing on quadratic functions we are able to examine optimization algorithms as a recursive application of linear…
We consider convex-concave saddle point problems with a separable structure and non-strongly convex functions. We propose an efficient stochastic block coordinate descent method using adaptive primal-dual updates, which enables flexible…
In this paper, we propose objective-function-free (OFF) variants of the proximal Newton method for nonconvex composite optimization problems and the regularized Newton method for unconstrained optimization problems, respectively, using…
The use of min-max optimization in adversarial training of deep neural network classifiers and training of generative adversarial networks has motivated the study of nonconvex-nonconcave optimization objectives, which frequently arise in…
Lens designers routinely use optimization in their everyday practice. Local optimization algorithms lead to the nearest minimum. In this paper, a new deterministic approach for multi-extremum optimization is proposed. Optimal solutions for…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (AGD), an instance of the general family of "momentum methods", provably achieves faster convergence rate than gradient descent (GD) in the convex setting. However, whether these methods are superior…
We address the problem of finding a local solution to a nonconvex-nonconcave minmax optimization using Newton type methods, including interior-point ones. We modify the Hessian matrix of these methods such that, at each step, the modified…