Related papers: Escaping From Saddle Points --- Online Stochastic …
This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…
We study a fixed step-size noisy distributed gradient descent algorithm for solving optimization problems in which the objective is a finite sum of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. Random perturbations are introduced to the…
We prove the local convergence to minima and estimates on the rate of convergence for the stochastic gradient descent method in the case of not necessarily globally convex nor contracting objective functions. In particular, the results are…
In this paper, we study decentralized online stochastic non-convex optimization over a network of nodes. Integrating a technique called gradient tracking in decentralized stochastic gradient descent, we show that the resulting algorithm,…
We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions,…
In this paper, we study the problem of escaping from saddle points in smooth nonconvex optimization problems subject to a convex set $\mathcal{C}$. We propose a generic framework that yields convergence to a second-order stationary point of…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a popular algorithm for optimization problems arising in high-dimensional inference tasks. Here one produces an estimator of an unknown parameter from independent samples of data by iteratively…
We study the unconstrained and the minimax saddle point variants of the convex multi-stage stochastic programming problem, where consecutive decisions are coupled through the objective functions, rather than through the constraints. We…
This paper considers the analysis of continuous time gradient-based optimization algorithms through the lens of nonlinear contraction theory. It demonstrates that in the case of a time-invariant objective, most elementary results on…
This paper focuses on the distributed optimization of stochastic saddle point problems. The first part of the paper is devoted to lower bounds for the centralized and decentralized distributed methods for smooth (strongly) convex-(strongly)…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…
The graduated optimization approach is a method for finding global optimal solutions for nonconvex functions by using a function smoothing operation with stochastic noise. This paper makes three contributions regarding graduated…
Online minimization of an unknown convex function over the interval $[0,1]$ is considered under first-order stochastic bandit feedback, which returns a random realization of the gradient of the function at each query point. Without knowing…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…
The convergence of stochastic gradient descent is highly dependent on the step-size, especially on non-convex problems such as neural network training. Step decay step-size schedules (constant and then cut) are widely used in practice…
In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…
In this paper, we consider a non-convex loss-minimization problem of learning Supervised PageRank models, which can account for some properties not considered by classical approaches such as the classical PageRank model. We propose…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
We present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…