Related papers: Simplified Gentlest Ascent Dynamics for Saddle Poi…
The article discusses distributed gradient-descent algorithms for computing local and global minima in nonconvex optimization. For local optimization, we focus on distributed stochastic gradient descent (D-SGD)--a simple network-based…
High-index saddle dynamics (HiSD) is an effective approach for computing saddle points of a prescribed Morse index and constructing solution landscapes for complex nonlinear systems. However, for problems with ill-conditioned Hessians…
Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent method (AGD) is a seminal deterministic first-order method known to achieve the optimal order of iteration complexity for solving convex smooth optimization problems. Two distinct sequences of…
We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…
Stochastic gradient descent (\textsc{Sgd}) methods are the most powerful optimization tools in training machine learning and deep learning models. Moreover, acceleration (a.k.a. momentum) methods and diagonal scaling (a.k.a. adaptive…
A central challenge to using first-order methods for optimizing nonconvex problems is the presence of saddle points. First-order methods often get stuck at saddle points, greatly deteriorating their performance. Typically, to escape from…
The article is devoted to the development of algorithmic methods ensuring efficient complexity bounds for strongly convex-concave saddle point problems in the case when one of the groups of variables is high-dimensional, and the other is…
Recently, sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has attracted much attention because of its surprising effectiveness in improving generalization performance. However, compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it is more prone to getting…
This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) with adaptive steps is widely used to train deep neural networks and generative models. Most theoretical results assume that it is possible to obtain unbiased gradient estimators, which is not the case in…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems assuming we have access to unbiased stochastic estimates of the gradients. We propose a stochastic accelerated primal-dual (SAPD) algorithm and show that SAPD sequence,…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending…
Large-scale non-convex sparsity-constrained problems have recently gained extensive attention. Most existing deterministic optimization methods (e.g., GraSP) are not suitable for large-scale and high-dimensional problems, and thus…
We propose the nullspace-preserving high-index saddle dynamics (NPHiSD) method for degenerating multiple solution systems in constrained and unconstrained settings. The NPHiSD efficiently locates high-index saddle points and provides parent…
The gradient descent-ascent (GDA) algorithm has been widely applied to solve minimax optimization problems. In order to achieve convergent policy parameters for minimax optimization, it is important that GDA generates convergent variable…
We consider the case of derivative-free algorithms for non-convex optimization, also known as zero order algorithms, that use only function evaluations rather than gradients. For a wide variety of gradient approximators based on finite…
We prove that various stochastic gradient descent methods, including the stochastic gradient descent (SGD), stochastic heavy-ball (SHB), and stochastic Nesterov's accelerated gradient (SNAG) methods, almost surely avoid any strict saddle…
We introduce a generalized numerical algorithm to construct the solution landscape, which is a pathway map consisting of all stationary points and their connections. Based on the high-index optimization-based shrinking dimer (HiOSD) method…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…