Saddle-point optimization problems are an important class of optimization problems with applications to game theory, multi-agent reinforcement learning and machine learning. A majority of the rich literature available for saddle-point optimization has focused on the offline setting. In this paper, we study nonstationar…
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New method solves saddle-point problems faster than existing methods.
FeDualEx tackles saddle point optimization in federated learning with composite objectives.
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, namely the presence of undesired stable stationary points that are no local optima…
A new method helps escape saddle points in non-convex optimization.
New algorithm solves saddle point problems in Banach spaces.
Equivalence of convex optimization, saddle-point problems, and variational inequalities is a well-established concept. The variational inequality (VI) is a static problem which is studied under dynamical settings using a framework called the projected dynamical system, whose stationary points coincide with the static s…
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 unified analysis as approximations of the classical proximal point method for solving…
We consider saddle point problems which objective functions are the average of strongly convex-concave individual components. Recently, researchers exploit variance reduction methods to solve such problems and achieve linear-convergence guarantees. However, these methods have a slow convergence when the condition n…
Houdini finds high-dimensional saddle points under few constraints.
Nonconvex optimization problems such as the ones in training deep neural networks suffer from a phenomenon called saddle point proliferation. This means that there are a vast number of high error saddle points present in the loss function. Second order methods have been tremendously successful and widely adopted in the…
New insights into matrix factorization show strict saddles have bounded eigenvalues.
In this paper we study the smooth convex-concave saddle point problem. Specifically, we analyze the last iterate convergence properties of the Extragradient (EG) algorithm. It is well known that the ergodic (averaged) iterates of EG converge at a rate of (Nemirovski, 2004). In this paper, we show that the last…
Optimal privacy-preserving algorithm for solving saddle point problems.
This paper extends Newton's method to distributed learning, avoiding saddle points and handling Byzantine workers.
A distributed optimization method solves saddle point problems with strong concavity and convexity.
In this article, we study the convergence of Mirror Descent (MD) and Optimistic Mirror Descent (OMD) for saddle point problems satisfying the notion of coherence as proposed in Mertikopoulos et al. We prove convergence of OMD with exact gradients for coherent saddle point problems, and show that monotone convergence on…
We consider the problem of computing optimal policies in average-reward Markov decision processes. This classical problem can be formulated as a linear program directly amenable to saddle-point optimization methods, albeit with a number of variables that is linear in the number of states. To address this issue, recent …
We consider convex-concave saddle point problems with a separable structure and non-strongly convex functions. We propose an efficient stochastic block coordinate descent method using adaptive primal-dual updates, which enables flexible parallel optimization for large-scale problems. Our method shares the efficiency an…
We reformulate LIPs as min-max problems for easier solution.
We extend the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization algorithm to solve constrained smooth convex-concave saddle point (SP) problems. Remarkably, the method only requires access to linear minimization oracles. Leveraging recent advances in FW optimization, we provide the first proof of convergence of a FW-type saddle point solv…
GenFlow optimizes faster, avoiding saddle points in fixed time.
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. In this paper we identify strict saddle property for non-convex problem that allo…
New algorithm helps escape saddle points in optimization problems.
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 minimizations, and it is often thought that a main source of difficulty for these l…
We consider a generic convex-concave saddle point problem with separable structure, a form that covers a wide-ranged machine learning applications. Under this problem structure, we follow the framework of primal-dual updates for saddle point problems, and incorporate stochastic block coordinate descent with adaptive st…
New method simplifies optimization landscapes by transforming saddle points.
New method stabilizes saddle-point optimization with unbounded gradients.
A generalized optimistic method for saddle point problems with improved complexity.
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 the non-smooth case, which requires different analysis and a different algorithm…
Nonconvex optimization algorithms with random initialization have attracted increasing attention recently. It has been showed that many first-order methods always avoid saddle points with random starting points. In this paper, we answer a question: can the nonconvex heavy-ball algorithms with random initialization avoi…
Optimizes bond portfolios to avoid worst-case losses.
Gradient descent can take exponentially long to escape saddle points in 2D.
New methods help escape strict saddle points in nonsmooth optimization.
We solve a complex optimization problem for Wasserstein barycenters using stochastic methods.
A new algorithm trains deep neural networks by adding neurons greedily.
PWGF escapes saddle points in nonconvex optimization.
DLNs dynamics change with variance, leading to saddle-to-saddle training phases.
We study the online saddle point problem, an online learning problem where at each iteration a pair of actions need to be chosen without knowledge of the current and future (convex-concave) payoff functions. The objective is to minimize the gap between the cumulative payoffs and the saddle point value of the aggregate …
A commonly used heuristic in non-convex optimization is Normalized Gradient Descent (NGD) - a variant of gradient descent in which only the direction of the gradient is taken into account and its magnitude ignored. We analyze this heuristic and show that with carefully chosen parameters and noise injection, this method…
New method for causal effect estimation with hidden confounders.
New ODE models show saddle-point optimization methods converge differently, with last-iterate convergence for OGDA.
New methods solve saddle point problems without line search.
Extends saddle-point method for large-time volatility smiles.
Although adversarial examples and model robustness have been extensively studied in the context of linear models and neural networks, research on this issue in tree-based models and how to make tree-based models robust against adversarial examples is still limited. In this paper, we show that tree based models are also…
Study on scalar curvature minimizability loss and saddle point solutions.
Deep ReLU networks escape from the origin via saddle points with a low-rank bias.
In this paper, we focus on solving a class of constrained non-convex non-concave saddle point problems in a decentralized manner by a group of nodes in a network. Specifically, we assume that each node has access to a summand of a global objective function and nodes are allowed to exchange information only with their n…