English
Related papers

Related papers: Escaping Saddle-Points Faster under Interpolation-…

200 papers

Large-scale non-convex optimization problems are expensive to solve due to computational and memory costs. To reduce the costs, first-order (computationally efficient) and asynchronous-parallel (memory efficient) algorithms are necessary to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-21 Marco Bornstein , Jin-Peng Liu , Jingling Li , Furong Huang

We study the performance of Stochastic Cubic Regularized Newton (SCRN) on a class of functions satisfying gradient dominance property with $1\le\alpha\le2$ which holds in a wide range of applications in machine learning and signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-24 Saeed Masiha , Saber Salehkaleybar , Niao He , Negar Kiyavash , Patrick Thiran

Recently, the problem of local minima in very high dimensional non-convex optimization has been challenged and the problem of saddle points has been introduced. This paper introduces a dynamic type of normalization that forces the system to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-08 Armen Aghajanyan

We propose perturbed proximal algorithms that can provably escape strict saddles for nonsmooth weakly convex functions. The main results are based on a novel characterization of $\epsilon$-approximate local minimum for nonsmooth functions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Minhui Huang , Weiming Zhu

Low-rank matrix sensing is a fundamental yet challenging nonconvex problem whose optimization landscape typically contains numerous spurious local minima, making it difficult for gradient-based optimizers to converge to the global optimum.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Tianqi Shen , Jinji Yang , Junze He , Kunhan Gao , Ziye Ma

Without randomization, escaping the saddle points of $f \colon \mathbb{R}^d \to \mathbb{R}$ requires at least $\Omega(d)$ pieces of information about $f$ (values, gradients, Hessian-vector products). With randomization, this can be reduced…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-17 Radu-Alexandru Dragomir , Xiaowen Jiang , Bonan Sun , Nicolas Boumal

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

Stochastic optimization methods have become a class of popular optimization tools in machine learning. Especially, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) has been widely used for machine learning problems such as training neural networks due to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-02-26 Qingsong Zhang , Feihu Huang , Cheng Deng , Heng Huang

In this paper, we propose a cubic regularized Newton (CRN) method for solving convex-concave saddle point problems (SPP). At each iteration, a cubic regularized saddle point subproblem is constructed and solved, which provides a search…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-08-25 Kevin Huang , Junyu Zhang , Shuzhong Zhang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Youming Tao , Zuyuan Zhang , Dongxiao Yu , Xiuzhen Cheng , Falko Dressler , Di Wang

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a prevalent optimization technique for large-scale distributed machine learning. While SGD computation can be efficiently divided between multiple machines, communication typically becomes a bottleneck…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Dmitrii Avdiukhin , Grigory Yaroslavtsev

Escaping saddle points is a central research topic in nonconvex optimization. In this paper, we propose a simple gradient-based algorithm such that for a smooth function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^n\to\mathbb{R}$, it outputs an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-30 Chenyi Zhang , Tongyang Li

This paper proposes a stochastic variant of a classic algorithm---the cubic-regularized Newton method [Nesterov and Polyak 2006]. The proposed algorithm efficiently escapes saddle points and finds approximate local minima for general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-12-07 Nilesh Tripuraneni , Mitchell Stern , Chi Jin , Jeffrey Regier , Michael I. Jordan

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

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Samet Oymak , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi

While first-order optimization methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are popular in machine learning (ML), they come with well-known deficiencies, including relatively-slow convergence, sensitivity to the settings of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-02-19 Peng Xu , Farbod Roosta-Khorasani , Michael W. Mahoney

In this paper, we propose a new adaptive stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (ASGLD) algorithmic framework and its two specialized versions, namely adaptive stochastic gradient (ASG) and adaptive gradient Langevin dynamics(AGLD), for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-25 Hejian Sang , Jia Liu

In this paper, we deal with algorithms to solve the finite-sum problems related to fitting over-parametrized models, that typically satisfy the interpolation condition. In particular, we focus on approaches based on stochastic line searches…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-05 Matteo Lapucci , Davide Pucci

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

In recent centralized nonconvex distributed learning and federated learning, local methods are one of the promising approaches to reduce communication time. However, existing work has mainly focused on studying first-order optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Tomoya Murata , Taiji Suzuki