Related papers: Convergence to Second-Order Stationarity for Const…
It is well-known that given a bounded, smooth nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (where the gradient norm is less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$ iterations. However,…
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…
Conditional Gradient algorithms (aka Frank-Wolfe algorithms) form a classical set of methods for constrained smooth convex minimization due to their simplicity, the absence of projection steps, and competitive numerical performance. While…
The Frank-Wolfe method (a.k.a. conditional gradient algorithm) for smooth optimization has regained much interest in recent years in the context of large scale optimization and machine learning. A key advantage of the method is that it…
While first-order stationary points (FOSPs) are the traditional targets of non-convex optimization, they often correspond to undesirable strict saddle points. To circumvent this, attention has shifted towards second-order stationary points…
In this paper we consider finding an approximate second-order stationary point (SOSP) of nonconvex conic optimization that minimizes a twice differentiable function over the intersection of an affine subspace and a convex cone. In…
We extend the standard notion of self-concordance to non-convex optimization and develop a family of second-order algorithms with global convergence guarantees. In particular, two function classes -- \textit{weakly self-concordant}…
The Hessian-vector product has been utilized to find a second-order stationary solution with strong complexity guarantee (e.g., almost linear time complexity in the problem's dimensionality). In this paper, we propose to further reduce the…
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…
In the present paper, we formulate two versions of Frank--Wolfe algorithm or conditional gradient method to solve the DC optimization problem with an adaptive step size. The DC objective function consists of two components; the first is…
We revisit the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization under strongly convex constraint sets. We provide a faster convergence rate for FW without line search, showing that a previously overlooked variant of FW is indeed faster than the standard…
This study introduces two second-order methods designed to provably avoid saddle points in composite nonconvex optimization problems: (i) a nonsmooth trust-region method and (ii) a curvilinear linesearch method. These developments are…
In this paper, we give a sharp analysis for Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and prove that SGD is able to efficiently escape from saddle points and find an $(\epsilon, O(\epsilon^{0.5}))$-approximate second-order stationary point in…
We investigate the problem of finding second-order stationary points (SOSP) in differentially private (DP) stochastic non-convex optimization. Existing methods suffer from two key limitations: (i) inaccurate convergence error rate due to…
We introduce a new projection-free (Frank-Wolfe) method for optimizing structured nonconvex functions that are expressed as a difference of two convex functions. This problem class subsumes smooth nonconvex minimization, positioning our…
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…
We investigate a class of nonconvex optimization problems characterized by a feasible set consisting of level-bounded nonconvex regularizers, with a continuously differentiable objective. We propose a novel hybrid approach to tackle such…
We introduce a class of first-order methods for smooth constrained optimization that are based on an analogy to non-smooth dynamical systems. Two distinctive features of our approach are that (i) projections or optimizations over the entire…
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…
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…