English
Related papers

Related papers: Stochastic noise can be helpful for variational qu…

200 papers

We study the asymptotic behavior of second-order algorithms mixing Newton's method and inertial gradient descent in non-convex landscapes. We show that, despite the Newtonian behavior of these methods, they almost always escape strict…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-13 Camille Castera

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 2014-06-11 Yann Dauphin , Razvan Pascanu , Caglar Gulcehre , Kyunghyun Cho , Surya Ganguli , Yoshua Bengio

Variational quantum algorithms, which have risen to prominence in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum setting, require the implementation of a stochastic optimizer on classical hardware. To date, most research has employed algorithms based…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-03-22 Matt Menickelly , Yunsoo Ha , Matthew Otten

In this work, we analyze the global convergence property of coordinate gradient descent with random choice of coordinates and stepsizes for non-convex optimization problems. Under generic assumptions, we prove that the algorithm iterate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-01 Ziang Chen , Yingzhou Li , Jianfeng Lu

We initiate the study of quantum algorithms for escaping from saddle points with provable guarantee. Given a function $f\colon\mathbb{R}^{n}\to\mathbb{R}$, our quantum algorithm outputs an $\epsilon$-approximate second-order stationary…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-08-25 Chenyi Zhang , Jiaqi Leng , Tongyang Li

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a frequently used optimization technique in classical machine learning and Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE). For the implementation of VQE on quantum hardware, the results are always affected by…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-17 Eriko Kaminishi , Takashi Mori , Michihiko Sugawara , Naoki Yamamoto

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-16 Jun Liu , Ye Yuan

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

The proliferation of saddle points, rather than poor local minima, is increasingly understood to be a primary obstacle in large-scale non-convex optimization for machine learning. Variable elimination algorithms, like Variable Projection…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Min Gan , Guang-Yong Chen , Yang Yi , Lin Yang

In this work, we conduct the first systematic study of stochastic variational inequality (SVI) and stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems under the constraint of differential privacy (DP). We propose two algorithms: Noisy Stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-04 Digvijay Boob , Cristóbal Guzmán

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-17 Luo Luo , Cheng Chen , Yujun Li , Guangzeng Xie , Zhihua Zhang

We analyze the behavior of randomized coordinate gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, proving that under standard assumptions, the iterates almost surely escape strict saddle points. By formulating the method as a nonlinear random…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-12 Ziang Chen , Yingzhou Li , Zihao Li

In the paper, we generalize the approach Gasnikov et. al, 2017, which allows to solve (stochastic) convex optimization problems with an inexact gradient-free oracle, to the convex-concave saddle-point problem. The proposed approach works,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-13 Aleksandr Beznosikov , Abdurakhmon Sadiev , Alexander Gasnikov

Variational quantum algorithms are expected to demonstrate the advantage of quantum computing on near-term noisy quantum computers. However, training such variational quantum algorithms suffers from gradient vanishing as the size of the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-11-29 Anbang Wu , Gushu Li , Yufei Ding , Yuan Xie

In this work, we consider solving optimization problems with a stochastic objective and deterministic equality constraints. We propose a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming method to find both first- and second-order stationary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-27 Yuchen Fang , Sen Na , Michael W. Mahoney , Mladen Kolar

A variant of consensus based distributed gradient descent (\textbf{DGD}) is studied for finite sums of smooth but possibly non-convex functions. In particular, the local gradient term in the fixed step-size iteration of each agent is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-27 Lei Qin , Michael Cantoni , Ye Pu

We propose a stochastic extension of the primal-dual hybrid gradient algorithm studied by Chambolle and Pock in 2011 to solve saddle point problems that are separable in the dual variable. The analysis is carried out for general…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-04-11 Antonin Chambolle , Matthias J. Ehrhardt , Peter Richtárik , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Variational hybrid quantum-classical optimization represents one of the most promising avenue to show the advantage of nowadays noisy intermediate-scale quantum computers in solving hard problems, such as finding the minimum-energy state of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-11-18 Laura Gentini , Alessandro Cuccoli , Stefano Pirandola , Paola Verrucchi , Leonardo Banchi

We consider non-smooth saddle point optimization problems. To solve these problems, we propose a zeroth-order method under bounded or Lipschitz continuous noise, possible adversarial. In contrast to the state-of-the-art algorithms, our…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-03-28 Darina Dvinskikh , Vladislav Tominin , Yaroslav Tominin , Alexander Gasnikov

We introduce a new stochastic algorithm to locate the index-1 saddle points of a function $V:\mathbb R^d \to \mathbb R$, with $d$ possibly large. This algorithm can be seen as an equivalent of the stochastic gradient descent which is a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-08-24 Tony Lelièvre , Panos Parpas