English
Related papers

Related papers: Global convergence of the gradient method for func…

200 papers

We propose a tensor-based criterion for benign landscape in phase retrieval and establish boundedness of gradient trajectories. This implies that gradient descent will converge to a global minimum for almost every initial point.

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-18 Théodore Fougereux , Cédric Josz , Xiaopeng Li

Gradient descent (GD) on logistic regression has many fascinating properties. When the dataset is linearly separable, it is known that the iterates converge in direction to the maximum-margin separator regardless of how large the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Si Yi Meng , Baptiste Goujaud , Antonio Orvieto , Christopher De Sa

A generalized conditional gradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of them differentiable, is presented. This iterative method relies on two main ingredients: First, the minimization of a partially linearized…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-01 Karl Kunisch , Daniel Walter

Classical optimisation theory guarantees monotonic objective decrease for gradient descent (GD) when employed in a small step size, or ``stable", regime. In contrast, gradient descent on neural networks is frequently performed in a large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Lachlan Ewen MacDonald , Hancheng Min , Leandro Palma , Salma Tarmoun , Ziqing Xu , René Vidal

While much progress has been achieved over the last decades in neuro-inspired machine learning, there are still fundamental theoretical problems in gradient-based learning using combinations of neurons. These problems, such as saddle points…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Winfried Lohmiller , Philipp Gassert , Jean-Jacques Slotine

Composite optimization problems, where the sum of a smooth and a merely lower semicontinuous function has to be minimized, are often tackled numerically by means of proximal gradient methods as soon as the lower semicontinuous part of the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-07-05 Christian Kanzow , Patrick Mehlitz

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-30 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu

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

A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-05-30 James Renegar

We consider a composite optimization problem where the sum of a continuously differentiable and a merely lower semicontinuous function has to be minimized. The proximal gradient algorithm is the classical method for solving such a problem…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-01 Xiaoxi Jia , Christian Kanzow , Patrick Mehlitz

This paper considers the problem of unconstrained minimization of smooth convex functions having Lipschitz continuous gradients with known Lipschitz constant. We recently proposed an optimized gradient method (OGM) for this problem and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-06-14 Donghwan Kim , Jeffrey A. Fessler

We develop new sub-optimality bounds for gradient descent (GD) that depend on the conditioning of the objective along the path of optimization rather than on global, worst-case constants. Key to our proofs is directional smoothness, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Aaron Mishkin , Ahmed Khaled , Yuanhao Wang , Aaron Defazio , Robert M. Gower

Stochastic gradient descent is the method of choice for large scale optimization of machine learning objective functions. Yet, its performance is greatly variable and heavily depends on the choice of the stepsizes. This has motivated a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-28 Xiaoyu Li , Francesco Orabona

We provide a new understanding of the stochastic gradient bandit algorithm by showing that it converges to a globally optimal policy almost surely using \emph{any} constant learning rate. This result demonstrates that the stochastic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Jincheng Mei , Bo Dai , Alekh Agarwal , Sharan Vaswani , Anant Raj , Csaba Szepesvari , Dale Schuurmans

We perform the first tight convergence analysis of the gradient method with varying step sizes when applied to smooth hypoconvex (weakly convex) functions. Hypoconvex functions are smooth nonconvex functions whose curvature is bounded and…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-22 Teodor Rotaru , François Glineur , Panagiotis Patrinos

The aim of this paper is to deepen the convergence analysis of the scaled gradient projection (SGP) method, proposed by Bonettini et al. in a recent paper for constrained smooth optimization. The main feature of SGP is the presence of a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2015-09-10 Silvia Bonettini , Marco Prato

We identify and analyze a fundamental limitation of the classical projected subgradient method in nonsmooth convex optimization: the inevitable failure caused by the absence of valid subgradients at boundary points. We show that, under…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-17 Zhihan Zhu , Yanhao Zhang , Yong Xia

In this paper, we present a new complexity result for the gradient descent method with an appropriately fixed stepsize for minimizing a strongly convex function with locally $\alpha$-H{\"o}lder continuous gradients ($0 < \alpha \leq 1$).…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-07 Xiaojun Chen , C. T. Kelley , Lei Wang

We prove the weak and the strong convergence of the trajectories of the continuous gradient projection method under some mild assumptions on the objective function and the step size function. Moreover, we estimate the decay rate to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-10-30 Ramzi May

This paper proposes a stochastic gradient descent method with an adaptive Gaussian noise term for the global minimization of nearly convex functions, which are nonconvex and possess multiple strict local minimizers. The noise term,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-08-05 Chenglong Bao , Liang Chen , Weizhi Shao