Related papers: Heavy-ball Algorithms Always Escape Saddle Points

Saddle-point optimization problems are an important class of optimization problems with applications to game theory, multi-agent reinforcement learning and machine learning. A majority of the rich literature available for saddle-point…

Gradient-based (a.k.a. `first order') optimization algorithms are routinely used to solve large scale non-convex problems. Yet, it is generally hard to predict their effectiveness. In order to gain insight into this question, we revisit the…

We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…

Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (AGD), an instance of the general family of "momentum methods", provably achieves faster convergence rate than gradient descent (GD) in the convex setting. However, whether these methods are superior…

The note considers normalized gradient descent (NGD), a natural modification of classical gradient descent (GD) in optimization problems. A serious shortcoming of GD in non-convex problems is that GD may take arbitrarily long to escape from…

In this paper, we explore a broad class of constrained saddle point problems with a bilevel structure, wherein the upper-level objective function is nonconvex-concave and smooth over compact and convex constraint sets, subject to a strongly…

In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…

Non-convex optimization is a critical tool in advancing machine learning, especially for complex models like deep neural networks and support vector machines. Despite challenges such as multiple local minima and saddle points, non-convex…

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…

In this paper, we consider a class of non-convex and non-smooth sparse optimization problems, which encompass most existing nonconvex sparsity-inducing terms. We show the second-order optimality conditions only depend on the nonzeros of the…

Optimization algorithms are unlikely to converge to strict saddle points. Proofs to that effect rely on the Center-Stable Manifold Theorem (CSMT), casting algorithms as dynamical systems: $x_{k+1} = g_k(x_k)$. In its standard form, the CSMT…

It is well-known that given a smooth, bounded-from-below, and possibly nonconvex function, standard gradient-based methods can find $\epsilon$-stationary points (with gradient norm less than $\epsilon$) in $\mathcal{O}(1/\epsilon^2)$…

Adversarial neural networks solve many important problems in data science, but are notoriously difficult to train. These difficulties come from the fact that optimal weights for adversarial nets correspond to saddle points, and not…

In this paper, we study the lower iteration complexity bounds for finding the saddle point of a strongly convex and strongly concave saddle point problem: $\min_x\max_yF(x,y)$. We restrict the classes of algorithms in our investigation to…

Motivated by the conspicuous use of momentum-based algorithms in deep learning, we study a nonsmooth nonconvex stochastic heavy ball method and show its convergence. Our approach builds upon semialgebraic (definable) assumptions commonly…

Recent applications that arise in machine learning have surged significant interest in solving min-max saddle point games. This problem has been extensively studied in the convex-concave regime for which a global equilibrium solution can be…

It is well known that finding a global optimum is extremely challenging for nonconvex optimization. There are some recent efforts \cite{anandkumar2016efficient, cartis2018second, cartis2020sharp, chen2019high} regarding the optimization…

It is an old idea to use gradient flows or time-discretized variants thereof as methods for solving minimization problems. In some applications, for example in machine learning contexts, it is important to know that for generic initial…

We present a comprehensive theoretical analysis of first-order methods for escaping strict saddle points in smooth non-convex optimization. Our main contribution is a Perturbed Saddle-escape Descent (PSD) algorithm with fully explicit…

Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…