Related papers: Using Witten Laplacians to locate index-1 saddle p…
We present a class of simple algorithms that allows to find the reaction path in systems with a complex potential energy landscape. The approach does not need any knowledge on the product state and does not require the calculation of any…
The article is devoted to the development of algorithmic methods ensuring efficient complexity bounds for strongly convex-concave saddle point problems in the case when one of the groups of variables is high-dimensional, and the other is…
We introduce a saddle-point finder that can find the complex saddle points for any analytically continued action. We showcase our saddle-point finder by two examples in the EPRL spin foam model: the single vertex case and the case of…
We consider (stochastic) convex-concave saddle point (SP) problems with high-dimensional decision variables, arising in various applications including machine learning problems. To contend with the challenges in computing full gradients, we…
One of the most attractive recent approaches to processing well-structured large-scale convex optimization problems is based on smooth convex-concave saddle point reformu-lation of the problem of interest and solving the resulting problem…
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…
We propose stochastic optimization algorithms that can find local minima faster than existing algorithms for nonconvex optimization problems, by exploiting the third-order smoothness to escape non-degenerate saddle points more efficiently.…
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…
Here we present a multiscale method to calculate the saddle point associated with the effective dynamics arising from a stochastic system which couples slow deterministic drift and fast stochastic dynamics. This problem is motivated by the…
In recent years, important progress has been made in applying methods and techniques of convex optimization to many fields of applications such as location science, engineering, computational statistics, and computer science. In this paper,…
Saddle-point problems have recently gained increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications…
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…
Most algorithms for solving optimization problems or finding saddle points of convex-concave functions are fixed-point algorithms. In this work we consider the generic problem of finding a fixed point of an average of operators, or an…
We study the factor model problem, which aims to uncover low-dimensional structures in high-dimensional datasets. Adopting a robust data-driven approach, we formulate the problem as a saddle-point optimization. Our primary contribution is a…
We give the first polynomial time algorithms for escaping from high-dimensional saddle points under a moderate number of constraints. Given gradient access to a smooth function $f \colon \mathbb R^d \to \mathbb R$ we show that (noisy)…
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…
For a real valued function, a point is critical if its derivatives are zero, and a critical point is a saddle point if it is not a local extrema. In this paper, we study algorithms to find saddle points of general Morse index. Our approach…
In a series of papers \cite{LSJR16, PP17, LPP}, it was established that some of the most commonly used first order methods almost surely (under random initializations) and with step-size being small enough, avoid strict saddle points, as…
Stochastic gradient descent is a simple approach to find the local minima of a cost function whose evaluations are corrupted by noise. In this paper, we develop a procedure extending stochastic gradient descent algorithms to the case where…
The problem of computing saddle points is important in certain problems in numerical partial differential equations and computational chemistry, and is often solved numerically by a minimization problem over a set of mountain passes. We…