Related papers: Stability and instability in saddle point dynamics…
In this paper, we study the stability and convergence of continuous-time Lagrangian saddle flows to solutions of a convex constrained optimization problem. Convergence of these flows is well-known when the underlying saddle function is…
Min-max saddle point games appear in a wide range of applications in machine leaning and signal processing. Despite their wide applicability, theoretical studies are mostly limited to the special convex-concave structure. While some recent…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
We study a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems of the form $\min_x\max_y \langle Kx,y\rangle+f_{\cal{P}}(x)-h^\ast(y)$ where $K$ is a linear operator, $f_{\cal{P}}$ is the sum of a convex function $f$ with a Lipschitz-continuous…
Stochastic optimization has found wide applications in minimizing objective functions in machine learning, which motivates a lot of theoretical studies to understand its practical success. Most of existing studies focus on the convergence…
Policy gradients methods apply to complex, poorly understood, control problems by performing stochastic gradient descent over a parameterized class of polices. Unfortunately, even for simple control problems solvable by standard dynamic…
Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) is a recently proposed training method that seeks to find flat minima in deep learning, resulting in state-of-the-art performance across various domains. Instead of minimizing the loss of the current…
We establish sharp well-posedness and approximation estimates for variational saddle point systems at the continuous level. The main results of this note have been known to be true only in the finite dimensional case. Known spectral results…
Owing to their connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs), saddle-point problems have recently attracted considerable interest in machine learning and beyond. By necessity, most theoretical guarantees revolve around…
Saddle points provide a hierarchical view of the energy landscape, revealing transition pathways and interconnected basins of attraction, and offering insight into the global structure, metastability, and possible collective mechanisms of…
In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for…
This paper is devoted to the study of stochastic optimization problems under the generalized smoothness assumption. By considering the unbiased gradient oracle in Stochastic Gradient Descent, we provide strategies to achieve in bounds the…
Dual averaging and gradient descent with their stochastic variants stand as the two canonical recipe books for first-order optimization: Every modern variant can be viewed as a descendant of one or the other. In the convex regime, these…
We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…
Recently, researchers observed that gradient descent for deep neural networks operates in an ``edge-of-stability'' (EoS) regime: the sharpness (maximum eigenvalue of the Hessian) is often larger than stability threshold $2/\eta$ (where…
Nonconvex optimization problems such as the ones in training deep neural networks suffer from a phenomenon called saddle point proliferation. This means that there are a vast number of high error saddle points present in the loss function.…
Gradient descent and stochastic gradient descent are central to modern machine learning, yet their behavior under large step sizes remains theoretically unclear. Recent work suggests that acceleration often arises near the edge of…
This is a handbook of simple proofs of the convergence of gradient and stochastic gradient descent type methods. We consider functions that are Lipschitz, smooth, convex, strongly convex, and/or Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz functions. Our focus is…
In this paper, we introduce a stochastic projected subgradient method for weakly convex (i.e., uniformly prox-regular) nonsmooth, nonconvex functions---a wide class of functions which includes the additive and convex composite classes. At a…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…