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Two classes of methods have been proposed for escaping from saddle points with one using the second-order information carried by the Hessian and the other adding the noise into the first-order information. The existing analysis for…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-05 Yi Xu , Rong Jin , Tianbao Yang

We consider non-differentiable dynamic optimization problems such as those arising in robotics and subspace tracking. Given the computational constraints and the time-varying nature of the problem, a low-complexity algorithm is desirable,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-20 Rishabh Dixit , Amrit Singh Bedi , Ruchi Tripathi , Ketan Rajawat

Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (SGD) enables scalable distributed training but suffers from gradient staleness. Existing mitigation strategies, such as delay-adaptive learning rates and staleness-aware filtering, typically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Tehila Dahan , Roie Reshef , Sharon Goldstein , Kfir Y. Levy

Distributed descent-based methods are an essential toolset to solving optimization problems in multi-agent system scenarios. Here the agents seek to optimize a global objective function through mutual cooperation. Oftentimes, cooperation is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-08-28 Arunselvan Ramaswamy

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-03 Fanhua Shang , Bingkun Wei , Hongying Liu , Yuanyuan Liu , Jiacheng Zhuo

We study high-probability (HP) convergence guarantees in decentralized stochastic optimization, where multiple agents collaborate to jointly train a model over a network. Existing HP results in decentralized settings almost exclusively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Aleksandar Armacki , Haoyuan Cai , Ali H. Sayed

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-30 Lampros Flokas , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis , Georgios Piliouras

Wasserstein gradient flow (WGF) is a common method to perform optimization over the space of probability measures. While WGF is guaranteed to converge to a first-order stationary point, for nonconvex functionals the converged solution does…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-23 Naoya Yamamoto , Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

We introduce a new, high-throughput, synchronous, distributed, data-parallel, stochastic-gradient-descent learning algorithm. This algorithm uses amortized inference in a compute-cluster-specific, deep, generative, dynamical model to…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2018-03-14 Michael Teng , Frank Wood

In this work, we consider strongly convex strongly concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems $\min_{x\in\mathbb{R}^{d_x}}\max_{y\in\mathbb{R}^{d_y}}f(x,y)$ where $f$ is $L$-smooth, $f(.,y)$ is $\mu$-strongly convex for every $y$, and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-22 Bugra Can , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Necdet Serhat Aybat

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-05-29 Razvan Pascanu , Yann N. Dauphin , Surya Ganguli , Yoshua Bengio

This paper considers the problem of understanding the behavior of a general class of accelerated gradient methods on smooth nonconvex functions. Motivated by some recent works that have proposed effective algorithms, based on Polyak's heavy…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-07 Rishabh Dixit , Mert Gurbuzbalaban , Waheed U. Bajwa

Within the current sphere of deep learning research, despite the extensive application of optimization algorithms such as Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Adaptive Moment Estimation (Adam), there remains a pronounced inadequacy in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Zhifeng Wang , Longlong Li , Chunyan Zeng

Machine learning problems such as neural network training, tensor decomposition, and matrix factorization, require local minimization of a nonconvex function. This local minimization is challenged by the presence of saddle points, of which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-07-23 Santiago Paternain , Aryan Mokhtari , Alejandro Ribeiro

We propose Adaptive Compressed Gradient Descent (AdaCGD) - a novel optimization algorithm for communication-efficient training of supervised machine learning models with adaptive compression level. Our approach is inspired by the recently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Maksim Makarenko , Elnur Gasanov , Rustem Islamov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Peter Richtarik

Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) methods offer a simple and scalable approach to topology optimization (TO), yet they often struggle with nonlinear and multi-constraint problems due to the complexity of active-set detection. This paper…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Amin Heyrani Nobari , Faez Ahmed

Gradient optimization algorithms using epochs, that is those based on stochastic gradient descent without replacement (SGDo), are predominantly used to train machine learning models in practice. However, the mathematical theory of SGDo and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Stefan Perko

In this paper, we unroll the dynamics of the dual ascent (DA) algorithm in two coupled graph neural networks (GNNs) to solve constrained optimization problems. The two networks interact with each other at the layer level to find a saddle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Samar Hadou , Alejandro Ribeiro

In this paper, we present novel randomized algorithms for solving saddle point problems whose dual feasible region is given by the direct product of many convex sets. Our algorithms can achieve an ${\cal O}(1/N)$ and ${\cal O}(1/N^2)$ rate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-11-16 Cong Dang , Guanghui Lan

Gradient Descent Ascent (GDA) methods for min-max optimization problems typically produce oscillatory behavior that can lead to instability, e.g., in bilinear settings. To address this problem, we introduce a dissipation term into the GDA…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-15 Tianqi Zheng , Nicolas Loizou , Pengcheng You , Enrique Mallada