Related papers: Escaping From Saddle Points Using Asynchronous Coo…
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…
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…
Recent focus on robustness to adversarial attacks for deep neural networks produced a large variety of algorithms for training robust models. Most of the effective algorithms involve solving the min-max optimization problem for training…
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…
In this paper, we consider first-order convergence theory and algorithms for solving a class of non-convex non-concave min-max saddle-point problems, whose objective function is weakly convex in the variables of minimization and weakly…
We analyze stochastic gradient descent for optimizing non-convex functions. In many cases for non-convex functions the goal is to find a reasonable local minimum, and the main concern is that gradient updates are trapped in saddle points.…
In this paper we investigate the convergence of a recently popular class of first-order primal-dual algorithms for saddle point problems under the presence of errors occurring in the proximal maps and gradients. We study several types of…
Gradient-based first-order convex optimization algorithms find widespread applicability in a variety of domains, including machine learning tasks. Motivated by the recent advances in fixed-time stability theory of continuous-time dynamical…
Gradient descent (GD) and stochastic gradient descent (SGD) are the workhorses of large-scale machine learning. While classical theory focused on analyzing the performance of these methods in convex optimization problems, the most notable…
In this paper, we study the problem of escaping from saddle points in smooth nonconvex optimization problems subject to a convex set $\mathcal{C}$. We propose a generic framework that yields convergence to a second-order stationary point of…
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…
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…
These notes focus on the minimization of convex functionals using first-order optimization methods, which are fundamental in many areas of applied mathematics and engineering. The primary goal of this document is to introduce and analyze…
We design a non-convex second-order optimization algorithm that is guaranteed to return an approximate local minimum in time which scales linearly in the underlying dimension and the number of training examples. The time complexity of our…
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…
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…
First-order methods for minimization and saddle point (min-max) problems are widely used for solving large-scale problems, in particular arising in machine learning. The majority of works obtain favorable complexity guarantees of such…
Bilevel optimization is one of the fundamental problems in machine learning and optimization. Recent theoretical developments in bilevel optimization focus on finding the first-order stationary points for nonconvex-strongly-convex cases. In…
We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration motions…
This paper shows that a perturbed form of gradient descent converges to a second-order stationary point in a number iterations which depends only poly-logarithmically on dimension (i.e., it is almost "dimension-free"). The convergence rate…