Related papers: A Stochastic Algorithm for Searching Saddle Points…
We consider the population Wasserstein barycenter problem for random probability measures supported on a finite set of points and generated by an online stream of data. This leads to a complicated stochastic optimization problem where the…
Saddle point problems, ubiquitous in optimization, extend beyond game theory to diverse domains like power networks and reinforcement learning. This paper presents novel approaches to tackle saddle point problem, with a focus on…
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…
Stochastically controlled stochastic gradient (SCSG) methods have been proved to converge efficiently to first-order stationary points which, however, can be saddle points in nonconvex optimization. It has been observed that a stochastic…
We consider stochastic strongly-convex-strongly-concave (SCSC) saddle point (SP) problems which frequently arise in applications ranging from distributionally robust learning to game theory and fairness in machine learning. We focus on the…
We study a stochastic first order primal-dual method for solving convex-concave saddle point problems over real reflexive Banach spaces using Bregman divergences and relative smoothness assumptions, in which we allow for stochastic error in…
Gradient descent is a popular algorithm in optimization, and its performance in convex settings is mostly well understood. In non-convex settings, it has been shown that gradient descent is able to escape saddle points asymptotically and…
Nonconvex optimization underlies many modern machine learning and control tasks, where saddle points pose the dominant obstacle to reliable convergence in high-dimensional settings. Escaping these saddle points deterministically using…
Training deep neural network is a high dimensional and a highly non-convex optimization problem. Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm and it's variations are the current state-of-the-art solvers for this task. However, due to…
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…
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…
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…
We develop stochastic first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve a class of convex-concave saddle-point problems. When the saddle function is strongly convex in the primal variable, we develop the first stochastic restart scheme for this…
Randomly initialized first-order optimization algorithms are the method of choice for solving many high-dimensional nonconvex problems in machine learning, yet general theoretical guarantees cannot rule out convergence to critical points of…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
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…
We present a stochastic descent algorithm for unconstrained optimization that is particularly efficient when the objective function is slow to evaluate and gradients are not easily obtained, as in some PDE-constrained optimization and…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) with stochastic momentum is popular in nonconvex stochastic optimization and particularly for the training of deep neural networks. In standard SGD, parameters are updated by improving along the path of the…
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…
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…