相关论文: Spurious local minima in nonconvex sum-of-squares …

When searching for global optima of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems, it is desirable that every local minimum be a global minimum. This property of having no spurious local minima is true in various problems of interest…

Variance reduction techniques like SVRG provide simple and fast algorithms for optimizing a convex finite-sum objective. For nonconvex objectives, these techniques can also find a first-order stationary point (with small gradient). However,…

We develop a line-search second-order algorithmic framework for minimizing finite sums. We do not make any convexity assumptions, but require the terms of the sum to be continuously differentiable and have Lipschitz-continuous gradients.…

We present a stochastic optimization method that uses a fourth-order regularized model to find local minima of smooth and potentially non-convex objective functions with a finite-sum structure. This algorithm uses sub-sampled derivatives…

This paper studies the nonsmooth optimization landscape of the $\ell_1$-norm rank-one symmetric matrix factorization problem using tools from second-order variational analysis. Specifically, as the main finding of this paper, we show that…

We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for…

Matrix completion is a basic machine learning problem that has wide applications, especially in collaborative filtering and recommender systems. Simple non-convex optimization algorithms are popular and effective in practice. Despite recent…

We study the problem of decomposing a polynomial $p$ into a sum of $r$ squares by minimizing a quadratically penalized objective $f_p(\mathbf{u}) = \left\lVert \sum_{i=1}^r u_i^2 - p\right\lVert^2$. This objective is nonconvex and is…

We investigate the local topological structure, stationary point sets in parametric optimization genericly may have. Our main result states that, up to stratified isomorphism, any such structure is already present in the small subclass of…

Numerous interesting properties in nonlinear systems analysis can be written as polynomial optimization problems with nonconvex sum-of-squares problems. To solve those problems efficiently, we propose a sequential approach of local…

Motivated by TRACE algorithm [Curtis et al. 2017], we propose a trust region algorithm for finding second order stationary points of a linearly constrained non-convex optimization problem. We show the convergence of the proposed algorithm…

In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving a sequence of…

We consider the notions of (i) critical points, (ii) second-order points, (iii) local minima, and (iv) strict local minima for multivariate polynomials. For each type of point, and as a function of the degree of the polynomial, we study the…

We propose two algorithms that can find local minima faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms in both finite-sum and general stochastic nonconvex optimization. At the core of the proposed algorithms is $\text{One-epoch-SNVRG}^+$ using…

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.…

We propose and analyze several stochastic gradient algorithms for finding stationary points or local minimum in nonconvex, possibly with nonsmooth regularizer, finite-sum and online optimization problems. First, we propose a simple proximal…

We consider the problem of finding an approximate second-order stationary point of a constrained non-convex optimization problem. We first show that, unlike the gradient descent method for unconstrained optimization, the vanilla projected…

This paper focuses on regularisation methods using models up to the third order to search for up to second-order critical points of a finite-sum minimisation problem. The variant presented belongs to the framework of [3]: it employs random…

We analyze stochastic gradient algorithms for optimizing nonconvex problems. In particular, our goal is to find local minima (second-order stationary points) instead of just finding first-order stationary points which may be some bad…

We consider the nonconvex minimization problem, with quartic objective function, that arises in the exact recovery of a configuration matrix $P\in \R^{nd}$ of $n$ points when a Euclidean distance matrix, \EDMp, is given with embedding…