Related papers: Neon2: Finding Local Minima via First-Order Oracle…

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…

In this paper, we aim to study non-convex minimization problems via second-order (in-time) dynamics, including a non-vanishing viscous damping and a geometric Hessian-driven damping. Second-order systems that only rely on a viscous damping…

We provide an interior point method based on quasi-Newton iterations, which only requires first-order access to a strongly self-concordant barrier function. To achieve this, we extend the techniques of Dunagan-Harvey [STOC '07] to maintain…

Many problems of substantial current interest in machine learning, statistics, and data science can be formulated as sparse and low-rank optimization problems. In this paper, we present the nonconvex exterior-point optimization solver NExOS…

Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…

We study a class of zeroth-order distributed optimization problems, where each agent can control a partial vector and observe a local cost that depends on the joint vector of all agents, and the agents can communicate with each other with…

We introduce new global and local inexact oracle concepts for a wide class of convex functions in composite convex minimization. Such inexact oracles naturally come from primal-dual framework, barrier smoothing, inexact computations of…

We consider the problem of finding an approximate second-order stationary point of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. We first show that, unlike the gradient descent method for unconstrained optimization, the vanilla projected…

We study finite-sum nonconvex optimization problems, where the objective function is an average of $n$ nonconvex functions. We propose a new stochastic gradient descent algorithm based on nested variance reduction. Compared with…

The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…

Gradient descent is the primary workhorse for optimizing large-scale problems in machine learning. However, its performance is highly sensitive to the choice of the learning rate. A key limitation of gradient descent is its lack of natural…

We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

This paper considers optimization of smooth nonconvex functionals in smooth infinite dimensional spaces. A H\"older gradient descent algorithm is first proposed for finding approximate first-order points of regularized polynomial…

We consider minimization of a smooth nonconvex function with inexact oracle access to gradient and Hessian (without assuming access to the function value) to achieve approximate second-order optimality. A novel feature of our method is that…

Topology optimization problems often support multiple local minima due to a lack of convexity. Typically, gradient-based techniques combined with continuation in model parameters are used to promote convergence to more optimal solutions;…

Finite-sum optimization problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, and are commonly solved using first-order methods which rely on gradient computations. Recently, there has been growing interest in \emph{second-order} methods, which rely…

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…

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 present new algorithms for optimizing non-smooth, non-convex stochastic objectives based on a novel analysis technique. This improves the current best-known complexity for finding a $(\delta,\epsilon)$-stationary point from…