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Recent years have seen increased interest in performance guarantees of gradient descent algorithms for non-convex optimization. A number of works have uncovered that gradient noise plays a critical role in the ability of gradient descent…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

We analyze the behavior of randomized coordinate gradient descent for nonconvex optimization, proving that under standard assumptions, the iterates almost surely escape strict saddle points. By formulating the method as a nonlinear random…

Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) methods see many uses in optimization problems. Modifications to the algorithm, such as momentum-based SGD methods have been known to produce better results in certain cases. Much of this, however, is due…

Many modern learning tasks involve fitting nonlinear models to data which are trained in an overparameterized regime where the parameters of the model exceed the size of the training dataset. Due to this overparameterization, the training…

Motivated by the super-diffusivity of self-repelling random walk, which has roots in statistical physics, this paper develops a new perturbation mechanism for optimization algorithms. In this mechanism, perturbations are adapted to the…

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…

Escape from a potential well can occur in different physical systems, such as capsize of ships, resonance transitions in celestial mechanics, and dynamic snap-through of arches and shells, as well as molecular reconfigurations in chemical…

Characterizing and understanding the dynamics of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) around saddle points remains an open problem. We first show that saddle points in neural networks can be divided into two types, among which the Type-II…

A game theory inspired methodology is proposed for finding a function's saddle points. While explicit descent methods are known to have severe convergence issues, implicit methods are natural in an adversarial setting, as they take the…

Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent (AGD), an instance of the general family of "momentum methods", provably achieves faster convergence rate than gradient descent (GD) in the convex setting. However, whether these methods are superior…

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…

Gradient-based optimization methods are the most popular choice for finding local optima for classical minimization and saddle point problems. Here, we highlight a systemic issue of gradient dynamics that arise for saddle point problems,…

In this paper we consider solving saddle point problems using two variants of Gradient Descent-Ascent algorithms, Extra-gradient (EG) and Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) methods. We show that both of these algorithms admit a…

We consider minimizing a nonconvex, smooth function $f$ on a Riemannian manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We show that a perturbed version of Riemannian gradient descent algorithm converges to a second-order stationary point (and hence is able to…

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…

We study the asymptotic behavior of second-order algorithms mixing Newton's method and inertial gradient descent in non-convex landscapes. We show that, despite the Newtonian behavior of these methods, they almost always escape strict…