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Related papers: Lower Bounds for Finding Stationary Points I

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We study the optimization of non-convex functions that are not necessarily smooth (gradient and/or Hessian are Lipschitz) using first order methods. Smoothness is a restrictive assumption in machine learning in both theory and practice,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-06-27 Daniel Yiming Cao , August Y. Chen , Karthik Sridharan , Benjamin Tang

Coordinate descent methods have considerable impact in global optimization because global (or, at least, almost global) minimization is affordable for low-dimensional problems. Coordinate descent methods with high-order regularized models…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-28 V. S. Amaral , R. Andreani , E. G. Birgin , D. S. Marcondes , J. M. Martínez

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Mitchell Stern , Chi Jin , Jeffrey Regier , Michael I. Jordan

An adaptive regularization algorithm for unconstrained nonconvex optimization is presented in which the objective function is never evaluated, but only derivatives are used. This algorithm belongs to the class of adaptive regularization…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-05 S. Gratton , S. Jerad , Ph. L. Toint

We study gradient testing and gradient estimation of smooth functions using only a comparison oracle that, given two points, indicates which one has the larger function value. For any smooth $f\colon\mathbb R^n\to\mathbb R$,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Xiwen Tao , Chenyi Zhang , Helin Wang , Yexin Zhang , Tongyang Li

We provide sharp worst-case evaluation complexity bounds for nonconvex minimization problems with general inexpensive constraints, i.e.\ problems where the cost of evaluating/enforcing of the (possibly nonconvex or even disconnected)…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-31 Coralia Cartis , Nick I. M. Gould , Philippe L. Toint

In this paper, we study the lower iteration complexity bounds for finding the saddle point of a strongly convex and strongly concave saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yF(x,y)$. We restrict the classes of algorithms in our investigation to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-22 Junyu Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Shuzhong Zhang

We consider the problem of minimizing a differentiable function with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient on a stratified set and present a first-order algorithm designed to find a stationary point of that problem. Our assumptions on the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Guillaume Olikier , Kyle A. Gallivan , P. -A. Absil

We propose a descent subgradient algorithm for minimizing a real function, assumed to be locally Lipschitz, but not necessarily smooth or convex. To find an effective descent direction, the Goldstein subdifferential is approximated through…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-11 Morteza Maleknia , Majid Soleimani-damaneh

This paper is devoted to the analysis of worst case complexity bounds for linesearch-type derivative-free algorithms for the minimization of general non-convex smooth functions. We prove that two linesearch-type algorithms enjoy the same…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-01-13 Andrea Brilli , Morteza Kimiaei , Giampaolo Liuzzi , Stefano Lucidi

Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ oracle complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Haoyuan Cai , Sulaiman A. Alghunaim , Ali H. Sayed

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-19 Hong Zhu

We consider the optimization problem of the form $\min_{x \in \mathbb{R}^d} f(x) \triangleq \mathbb{E}_{\xi} [F(x; \xi)]$, where the component $F(x;\xi)$ is $L$-mean-squared Lipschitz but possibly nonconvex and nonsmooth. The recently…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-05-15 Lesi Chen , Jing Xu , Luo Luo

In this paper, we propose practical normalized stochastic first-order methods with Polyak momentum, multi-extrapolated momentum, and recursive momentum for solving unconstrained optimization problems. These methods employ dynamically…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-12 Chuan He , Zhaosong Lu , Defeng Sun , Zhanwang Deng

We consider the computation of an approximately stationary point for a Lipschitz and semialgebraic function $f$ with a local oracle. If $f$ is smooth, simple deterministic methods have dimension-free finite oracle complexities. For the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-14 Lai Tian , Anthony Man-Cho So

This paper considers the problem for finding the $(\delta,\epsilon)$-Goldstein stationary point of Lipschitz continuous objective, which is a rich function class to cover a great number of important applications. We construct a zeroth-order…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-22 Chengchang Liu , Chaowen Guan , Jianhao He , John C. S. Lui

Gradient descent and its variants are widely used in machine learning. However, oracle access of gradient may not be available in many applications, limiting the direct use of gradient descent. This paper proposes a method of estimating…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-07 Qinbo Bai , Mridul Agarwal , Vaneet Aggarwal

We study the problem of finding approximate first-order stationary points in optimization problems of the form $\min_{x \in X} \max_{y \in Y} f(x,y)$, where the sets $X,Y$ are convex and $Y$ is compact. The objective function $f$ is smooth,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-11 Dmitrii M. Ostrovskii , Babak Barazandeh , Meisam Razaviyayn

An adaptive regularization algorithm using high-order models is proposed for partially separable convexly constrained nonlinear optimization problems whose objective function contains non-Lipschitzian $\ell_q$-norm regularization terms for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-31 Xiaojun Chen , Philippe Toint , Hong Wang

This paper takes an initial step to systematically investigate the generalization bounds of algorithms for solving nonconvex-(strongly)-concave (NC-SC/NC-C) stochastic minimax optimization measured by the stationarity of primal functions.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-02-08 Siqi Zhang , Yifan Hu , Liang Zhang , Niao He