Related papers: A Stochastic Algorithm for Searching Saddle Points…
Large sectors of the recent optimization literature focused in the last decade on the development of optimal stochastic first order schemes for constrained convex models under progressively relaxed assumptions. Stochastic proximal point is…
This paper studies the saddle point problem of polynomials. We give an algorithm for computing saddle points. It is based on solving Lasserre's hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations. Under some genericity assumptions on defining…
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…
We present a mathematical and numerical investigation to the shrinkingdimer saddle dynamics for finding any-index saddle points in the solution landscape. Due to the dimer approximation of Hessian in saddle dynamics, the local Lipschitz…
We provide a numerically robust and fast method capable of exploiting the local geometry when solving large-scale stochastic optimisation problems. Our key innovation is an auxiliary variable construction coupled with an inverse Hessian…
We propose a regularized saddle-point algorithm for convex networked optimization problems with resource allocation constraints. Standard distributed gradient methods suffer from slow convergence and require excessive communication when…
In this work, we present a globalized stochastic semismooth Newton method for solving stochastic optimization problems involving smooth nonconvex and nonsmooth convex terms in the objective function. We assume that only noisy gradient and…
We study non-smooth stochastic decentralized optimization problems over time-varying networks, where objective functions are distributed across nodes and network connections may intermittently appear or break. Specifically, we consider two…
Large-scale non-convex optimization problems are expensive to solve due to computational and memory costs. To reduce the costs, first-order (computationally efficient) and asynchronous-parallel (memory efficient) algorithms are necessary to…
Stochastic gradient optimization is the dominant learning paradigm for a variety of scenarios, from classical supervised learning to modern self-supervised learning. We consider stochastic gradient algorithms for learning problems whose…
For deterministic optimization, line-search methods augment algorithms by providing stability and improved efficiency. We adapt a classical backtracking Armijo line-search to the stochastic optimization setting. While traditional…
Consider a convex set of which we remove an arbitrarily number of disjoints convex sets -- the obstacles -- and a convex function whose minimum is the agent's goal. We consider a local and stochastic approximation of the gradient of a…
This paper develops a unified distributed method for solving two classes of constrained networked optimization problems, i.e., optimal consensus problem and resource allocation problem with non-identical set constraints. We first transform…
This article establishes a method to answer a finite set of linear queries on a given dataset while ensuring differential privacy. To achieve this, we formulate the corresponding task as a saddle-point problem, i.e. an optimization problem…
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)…
We establish that first-order methods avoid saddle points for almost all initializations. Our results apply to a wide variety of first-order methods, including gradient descent, block coordinate descent, mirror descent and variants thereof.…
In this paper we investigate how gradient-based algorithms such as gradient descent, (multi-pass) stochastic gradient descent, its persistent variant, and the Langevin algorithm navigate non-convex loss-landscapes and which of them is able…
We consider a class of non-smooth strongly convex-strongly concave saddle point problems in a decentralized setting without a central server. To solve a consensus formulation of problems in this class, we develop an inexact primal dual…
Algorithms for computing local minima of smooth objective functions enjoy a mature theory as well as robust and efficient implementations. By comparison, the theory and practice of saddle search is destitute. In this paper we present…
In this work, we propose an efficient nullspace-preserving saddle search (NPSS) method for a class of phase transitions involving translational invariance, where the critical states are often degenerate. The NPSS method includes two stages,…