Related papers: A Generic Approach for Escaping Saddle points

Higher-order tensor methods were recently proposed for minimizing smooth convex and nonconvex functions. Higher-order algorithms accelerate the convergence of the classical first-order methods thanks to the higher-order derivatives used in…

Many problems in machine learning and game theory can be formulated as saddle-point problems, for which various first-order methods have been developed and proven efficient in practice. Under the general convex-concave assumption, most…

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

In this paper, we present novel randomized algorithms for solving saddle point problems whose dual feasible region is given by the direct product of many convex sets. Our algorithms can achieve an ${\cal O}(1/N)$ and ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ rate…

Bilevel optimization is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning and optimization. Recent theoretical developments in bilevel optimization focus on finding the first-order stationary points for nonconvex-strongly-convex cases. In…

We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…

First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…

Two-point zeroth order methods are important in many applications of zeroth-order optimization, such as robotics, wind farms, power systems, online optimization, and adversarial robustness to black-box attacks in deep neural networks, where…

Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…

We study the asymptotic behavior of second-order algorithms mixing Newton's method and inertial gradient descent in non-convex landscapes. We show that, despite the Newtonian behavior of these methods, they almost always escape strict…

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…

First-order optimization methods, such as SGD and Adam, are widely used for training large-scale deep neural networks due to their computational efficiency and robust performance. However, relying solely on gradient information, these…

First-order methods for solving convex optimization problems have been at the forefront of mathematical optimization in the last 20 years. The rapid development of this important class of algorithms is motivated by the success stories…

The difficulty of minimizing a nonconvex function is in part explained by the presence of saddle points. This slows down optimization algorithms and impacts worst-case complexity guarantees. However, many nonconvex problems of interest…

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…

Trust region and cubic regularization methods have demonstrated good performance in small scale non-convex optimization, showing the ability to escape from saddle points. Each iteration of these methods involves computation of gradient,…

Despite their popularity in the field of continuous optimisation, second-order quasi-Newton methods are challenging to apply in machine learning, as the Hessian matrix is intractably large. This computational burden is exacerbated by the…

We provide an overview of primal-dual algorithms for nonsmooth and non-convex-concave saddle-point problems. This flows around a new analysis of such methods, using Bregman divergences to formulate simplified conditions for convergence.

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 consider the minimization of a continuous function over the intersection of a regular cone with an affine set via a new class of adaptive first- and second-order optimization methods, building on the Hessian-barrier techniques introduced…