Related papers: Lower Bounds for Finding Stationary Points I

We study the theoretical convergence properties of random-search methods when optimizing non-convex objective functions without having access to derivatives. We prove that standard random-search methods that do not rely on second-order…

We propose an adaptive zeroth-order method for minimizing differentiable functions with $L$-Lipschitz continuous gradients. The method is designed to take advantage of the eventual compressibility of the gradient of the objective function,…

We consider the problem of minimizing a differentiable function with locally Lipschitz continuous gradient over the real determinantal variety, and present a first-order algorithm designed to find stationary points of that problem. This…

First order methods endowed with global convergence guarantees operate using global lower bounds on the objective. The tightening of the bounds has been shown to increase both the theoretical guarantees and the practical performance. In…

We derive lower bounds on the black-box oracle complexity of large-scale smooth convex minimization problems, with emphasis on minimizing smooth (with Holder continuous, with a given exponent and constant, gradient) convex functions over…

We consider a step search method for continuous optimization under a stochastic setting where the function values and gradients are available only through inexact probabilistic zeroth- and first-order oracles. Unlike the stochastic gradient…

Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an…

In many contemporary optimization problems such as those arising in machine learning, it can be computationally challenging or even infeasible to evaluate an entire function or its derivatives. This motivates the use of stochastic…

Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex…

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…

Local search heuristics for non-convex optimizations are popular in applied machine learning. However, in general it is hard to guarantee that such algorithms even converge to a local minimum, due to the existence of complicated saddle…

We revisit the classical problem of finding an approximately stationary point of the average of $n$ smooth and possibly nonconvex functions. The optimal complexity of stochastic first-order methods in terms of the number of gradient…

For first-order optimization of non-convex functions with Lipschitz continuous gradient and Hessian, the best known complexity for reaching an $\varepsilon$-approximation of a stationary point is $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-7/4})$. Existing…

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function given quantum access to a stochastic gradient oracle. We provide two new methods for the special case of minimizing a Lipschitz convex function. Each method obtains a dimension…

We prove a tight lower bound (up to constant factors) on the sample complexity of any non-interactive local differentially private protocol for optimizing a linear function over the simplex. This lower bound also implies a tight lower bound…

We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for minimizing locally Lipschitz objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The algorithm, which is built upon the gradient-sampling methodology, is designed specifically for…

We report a practical finite-time algorithmic scheme to compute approximately stationary points for nonconvex nonsmooth Lipschitz functions. In particular, we are interested in two kinds of approximate stationarity notions for nonconvex…

We propose a derivative-free trust-region method based on finite-difference gradient approximations for smooth optimization problems with convex constraints. The proposed method does not require computing an approximate stationarity…

This paper studies minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y f(x,y)$, where $f(x,y)$ is $m_x$-strongly convex with respect to $x$, $m_y$-strongly concave with respect to $y$ and $(L_x,L_{xy},L_y)$-smooth. Zhang et al. provided the…