Related papers: Heavy-ball Algorithms Always Escape Saddle Points

Compared to ordinary function minimization problems, min-max optimization algorithms encounter far greater challenges because of the existence of periodic cycles and similar phenomena. Even though some of these behaviors can be overcome in…

Maximality, interval dominance, and E-admissibility are three well-known criteria for decision making under severe uncertainty using lower previsions. We present a new fast algorithm for finding maximal gambles. We compare its performance…

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 consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of $n$ strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence…

We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep…

Since their introduction, anchoring methods in extragradient-type saddlepoint problems have inspired a flurry of research due to their ability to provide order-optimal rates of accelerated convergence in very general problem settings. Such…

In this work, we analyze two of the most fundamental algorithms in geodesically convex optimization: Riemannian gradient descent and (possibly inexact) Riemannian proximal point. We quantify their rates of convergence and produce different…

We study a stochastic first order primal-dual method for solving convex-concave saddle point problems over real reflexive Banach spaces using Bregman divergences and relative smoothness assumptions, in which we allow for stochastic error in…

We introduce a geometrically transparent strict saddle property for nonsmooth functions. This property guarantees that simple proximal algorithms on weakly convex problems converge only to local minimizers, when randomly initialized. We…

Momentum Stochastic Gradient Descent (MSGD) algorithm has been widely applied to many nonconvex optimization problems in machine learning, e.g., training deep neural networks, variational Bayesian inference, and etc. Despite its empirical…

Extrapolation is a well-known technique for solving convex optimization and variational inequalities and recently attracts some attention for non-convex optimization. Several recent works have empirically shown its success in some machine…

We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty…

We exploit analogies between first-order algorithms for constrained optimization and non-smooth dynamical systems to design a new class of accelerated first-order algorithms for constrained optimization. Unlike Frank-Wolfe or projected…

This paper focuses on solving a stochastic saddle point problem (SPP) under an overparameterized regime for the case, when the gradient computation is impractical. As an intermediate step, we generalize Same-sample Stochastic Extra-gradient…

We proposed an iterate scheme for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems associated with general convex-concave functions. We demonstrated that when our iterate scheme is applied to a special class of convex-concave functions, which…

Large batch size training of Neural Networks has been shown to incur accuracy loss when trained with the current methods. The exact underlying reasons for this are still not completely understood. Here, we study large batch size training…

In this work, we consider bilevel optimization when the lower-level problem is strongly convex. Recent works show that with a Hessian-vector product (HVP) oracle, one can provably find an $\epsilon$-stationary point within…

We consider stochastic convex optimization with a strongly convex (but not necessarily smooth) objective. We give an algorithm which performs only gradient updates with optimal rate of convergence.

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

The rapid progress in machine learning in recent years has been based on a highly productive connection to gradient-based optimization. Further progress hinges in part on a shift in focus from pattern recognition to decision-making and…