Related papers: Lower Bounds for Finding Stationary Points I
We provide the first non-asymptotic analysis for finding stationary points of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions. In particular, we study the class of Hadamard semi-differentiable functions, perhaps the largest class of nonsmooth functions for…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
This paper studies the lower bound complexity for the optimization problem whose objective function is the average of $n$ individual smooth convex functions. We consider the algorithm which gets access to gradient and proximal oracle for…
A new, fast second-order method is proposed that achieves the optimal $\mathcal{O}\left(|\log(\epsilon)|\epsilon^{-3/2}\right)$ complexity to obtain first-order $\epsilon$-stationary points. Crucially, this is deduced without assuming the…
We study the optimal lower and upper complexity bounds for finding approximate solutions to the composite problem $\min_x\ f(x)+h(Ax-b)$, where $f$ is smooth and $h$ is convex. Given access to the proximal operator of $h$, for strongly…
This paper studies the complexity for finding approximate stationary points of nonconvex-strongly-concave (NC-SC) smooth minimax problems, in both general and averaged smooth finite-sum settings. We establish nontrivial lower complexity…
We study the problem of finding an $\epsilon$-first-order stationary point (FOSP) of a smooth function, given access only to gradient information. The best-known gradient query complexity for this task, assuming both the gradient and…
We provide a simple and flexible framework for designing differentially private algorithms to find approximate stationary points of non-convex loss functions. Our framework is based on using a private approximate risk minimizer to "warm…
Many recent studies on first-order methods (FOMs) focus on \emph{composite non-convex non-smooth} optimization with linear and/or nonlinear function constraints. Upper (or worst-case) complexity bounds have been established for these…
Bilevel optimization minimizes an objective function, defined by an upper-level problem whose feasible region is the solution of a lower-level problem. We study the oracle complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point with…
We develop a class of algorithms, as variants of the stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods (Lei and Jordan, 2016), for the smooth non-convex finite-sum optimization problem. Assuming the smoothness of each component,…
Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (PL) [Polyak, 1963] condition is a weaker condition than the strong convexity but suffices to ensure a global convergence for the Gradient Descent algorithm. In this paper, we study the lower bound of algorithms using…
We study the basic computational problem of detecting approximate stationary points for continuous piecewise affine (PA) functions. Our contributions span multiple aspects, including complexity, regularity, and algorithms. Specifically, we…
In this paper, we study the fundamental open question of finding the optimal high-order algorithm for solving smooth convex minimization problems. Arjevani et al. (2019) established the lower bound $\Omega\left(\epsilon^{-2/(3p+1)}\right)$…
In this paper, we study the lower complexity bounds for finite-sum optimization problems, where the objective is the average of $n$ individual component functions. We consider Proximal Incremental First-order (PIFO) algorithms which have…
Given a nonconvex function that is an average of $n$ smooth functions, we design stochastic first-order methods to find its approximate stationary points. The convergence of our new methods depends on the smallest (negative) eigenvalue…
We consider the problem of provably finding a stationary point of a smooth function to be minimized on the variety of bounded-rank matrices. This turns out to be unexpectedly delicate. We trace the difficulty back to a geometric obstacle:…
In this paper, we study the problem of solving a simple bilevel optimization problem, where the upper-level objective is minimized over the solution set of the lower-level problem. We focus on the general setting in which both the upper-…
This paper presents the first optimal-rate $p$-th order methods with $p\geq 1$ for finding first and second-order stationary points of non-convex smooth objective functions over Riemannian manifolds. In contrast to the geodesically convex…
We consider a family of algorithms that successively sample and minimize simple stochastic models of the objective function. We show that under reasonable conditions on approximation quality and regularity of the models, any such algorithm…