Related papers: Escape saddle points by a simple gradient-descent …
The goal of policy-based reinforcement learning (RL) is to search the maximal point of its objective. However, due to the inherent non-concavity of its objective, convergence to a first-order stationary point (FOSP) can not guarantee the…
In this paper, we discuss the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: a smooth function plus a non-smooth function. Further, the smooth part can be expressed by the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and…
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…
The alternating gradient descent (AGD) is a simple but popular algorithm which has been applied to problems in optimization, machine learning, data ming, and signal processing, etc. The algorithm updates two blocks of variables in an…
In part I we considered the problem of convergence to a saddle point of a concave-convex function via gradient dynamics and an exact characterization was given to their asymptotic behaviour. In part II we consider a general class of…
We propose and analyze several inexact regularized Newton-type methods for finding a global saddle point of convex-concave unconstrained min-max optimization problems. Compared to first-order methods, our understanding of second-order…
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…
Finding approximate stationary points, i.e., points where the gradient is approximately zero, of non-convex but smooth objective functions $f$ over unrestricted $d$-dimensional domains is one of the most fundamental problems in classical…
Nonconvex-concave min-max problem arises in many machine learning applications including minimizing a pointwise maximum of a set of nonconvex functions and robust adversarial training of neural networks. A popular approach to solve this…
We consider SDEs of the form $dX_t = |f(X_t)|/t^{\gamma} dt+1/t^{\gamma} dB_t$, where $f(x)$ behaves comparably to $|x|^k$ in a neighborhood of the origin, for $k\in [1,\infty)$. We show that there exists a threshold value…
Stochastic Gradient (SG) is the defacto iterative technique to solve stochastic optimization (SO) problems with a smooth (non-convex) objective $f$ and a stochastic first-order oracle. SG's attractiveness is due in part to its simplicity of…
We present a scheme improving the minimum-mode following method for finding first order saddle points by confining the displacements of atoms to the subset of those subject to the largest force. By doing so it is ensured that the…
In this paper we consider finding an approximate second-order stationary point (SOSP) of nonconvex conic optimization that minimizes a twice differentiable function over the intersection of an affine subspace and a convex cone. In…
In large-scale applications, such as machine learning, it is desirable to design non-convex optimization algorithms with a high degree of parallelization. In this work, we study the adaptive complexity of finding a stationary point, which…
In this paper, we study stochastic non-convex optimization with non-convex random functions. Recent studies on non-convex optimization revolve around establishing second-order convergence, i.e., converging to a nearly second-order optimal…
In this paper, we propose and analyze a fast two-point gradient algorithm for solving nonlinear ill-posed problems, which is based on the sequential subspace optimization method. A complete convergence analysis is provided under the…
We show that convex-concave Lipschitz stochastic saddle point problems (also known as stochastic minimax optimization) can be solved under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy with \emph{strong (primal-dual) gap} rate…
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…
We propose a fast second-order method that can be used as a drop-in replacement for current deep learning solvers. Compared to stochastic gradient descent (SGD), it only requires two additional forward-mode automatic differentiation…
We propose an alternating subgradient method with non-constant step sizes for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems associated with general convex-concave functions. We assume that the sequence of our step sizes is not summable but…