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Related papers: Heavy-ball Algorithms Always Escape Saddle Points

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We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Maxim Divilkovskiy , Alexander Gasnikov

We aim at computing the derivative of the solution to a parametric optimization problem with respect to the involved parameters. For a class broader than that of strongly convex functions, this can be achieved by automatic differentiation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-15 Sheheryar Mehmood , Peter Ochs

We introduce a new sequential subspace optimization method for large-scale saddle-point problems. It solves iteratively a sequence of auxiliary saddle-point problems in low-dimensional subspaces, spanned by directions derived from…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-24 Yoni Choukroun , Michael Zibulevsky , Pavel Kisilev

Large-scale saddle-point problems arise in such machine learning tasks as GANs and linear models with affine constraints. In this paper, we study distributed saddle-point problems (SPP) with strongly-convex-strongly-concave smooth…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-10-04 Dmitriy Metelev , Alexander Rogozin , Alexander Gasnikov , Dmitry Kovalev

In this work, we study the asymptotic randomness of an algorithmic estimator of the saddle point of a globally convex-concave and locally strongly-convex strongly-concave objective. Specifically, we show that the averaged iterates of a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-11-07 Abhishek Roy , Yi-An Ma

We consider convex-concave saddle-point problems where the objective functions may be split in many components, and extend recent stochastic variance reduction methods (such as SVRG or SAGA) to provide the first large-scale linearly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-04 P Balamurugan , Francis Bach

In this paper, we revisit the convergence of the Heavy-ball method, and present improved convergence complexity results in the convex setting. We provide the first non-ergodic O(1/k) rate result of the Heavy-ball algorithm with constant…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-12 Tao Sun , Penghang Yin , Dongsheng Li , Chun Huang , Lei Guan , Hao Jiang

In this paper, we provide some analysis on the asymptotic escape of strict saddles in manifold optimization using the projected gradient descent (PGD) algorithm. One of our main contributions is that we extend the current analysis to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-30 Thomas Y. Hou , Zhenzhen Li , Ziyun Zhang

We provide larger step-size restrictions for which gradient descent based algorithms (almost surely) avoid strict saddle points. In particular, consider a twice differentiable (non-convex) objective function whose gradient has Lipschitz…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-06 Hayden Schaeffer , Scott G. McCalla

Many problems in machine learning and game theory can be formulated as saddle-point problems, for which various first-order methods have been developed and proven efficient in practice. Under the general convex-concave assumption, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Yuan Gao , Christian Kroer , Donald Goldfarb

We provide an overview of primal-dual algorithms for nonsmooth and non-convex-concave saddle-point problems. This flows around a new analysis of such methods, using Bregman divergences to formulate simplified conditions for convergence.

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-03 Tuomo Valkonen

The problem of saddle-point avoidance for non-convex optimization is quite challenging in large scale distributed learning frameworks, such as Federated Learning, especially in the presence of Byzantine workers. The celebrated…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2021-12-30 Avishek Ghosh , Raj Kumar Maity , Arya Mazumdar , Kannan Ramchandran

Saddle point optimization is a critical problem employed in numerous real-world applications, including portfolio optimization, generative adversarial networks, and robotics. It has been extensively studied in cases where the objective…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Shubhankar Agarwal , Hamzah I. Khan , Sandeep P. Chinchali , David Fridovich-Keil

Convex-concave min-max problems are ubiquitous in machine learning, and people usually utilize first-order methods (e.g., gradient descent ascent) to find the optimal solution. One feature which separates convex-concave min-max problems…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-03-09 Mingrui Liu , Francesco Orabona

The convergence behaviour of first-order methods can be severely slowed down when applied to high-dimensional non-convex functions due to the presence of saddle points. If, additionally, the saddles are surrounded by large plateaus, it is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-12 Nick Tsipinakis , Panos Parpas

The Primal-Dual (PD) algorithm is widely used in convex optimization to determine saddle points. While the stability of the PD algorithm can be easily guaranteed, strict contraction is nontrivial to establish in most cases. This work…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-11-21 Hung D. Nguyen , Thanh Long Vu , Konstantin Turitsyn , Jean-Jacques Slotine

We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-15 Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Ekaterina Borodich , Dmitry Kovalev , Alexander Gasnikov , Pavel Dvurechensky

Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-09-07 Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Aleksandr Beznosikov , Pavel Dvurechensky , Alexander Gasnikov

A game theory inspired methodology is proposed for finding a function's saddle points. While explicit descent methods are known to have severe convergence issues, implicit methods are natural in an adversarial setting, as they take the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-04 Montacer Essid , Esteban Tabak , Giulio Trigila

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jun-Kun Wang , Chi-Heng Lin , Jacob Abernethy