text: Accelerated gradient (AG) methods are breakthroughs in convex optimization, improving the convergence rate of the gradient descent method for optimization with smooth functions. However, the analysis of AG methods for non-convex optimization is still limited. It remains an open question whether AG methods from convex optimization can accelerate the convergence of the gradient descent method for finding local minimum of non-convex optimization problems. This paper provides an affirmative answer to this question. In particular, we analyze two renowned variants of AG methods (namely Polyak's Heavy Ball method and Nesterov's Accelerated Gradient method) for extracting the negative curvature from random noise, which is central to escaping from saddle points. By leveraging the proposed AG methods for extracting the negative curvature, we present a new AG algorithm with double loops for non-convex optimization this is in contrast to a single-loop AG algorithm proposed in a recent manuscript , which directly analyzed the Nesterov's AG method for non-convex optimization and appeared online on November 29, 2017. However, we emphasize that our work is an independent work, which is inspired by our earlier work and is based on a different novel analysis. , which converges to second-order stationary point @math such that @math and @math with @math iteration complexity, improving that of gradient descent method by a factor of @math and matching the best iteration complexity of second-order Hessian-free methods for non-convex optimization.
  @cite_6: An Adaptive Regularisation framework using Cubics (ARC) was proposed for unconstrained optimization and analysed in Cartis, Gould and Toint (Part I, Math Program, doi: 10.1007 s10107-009-0286-5, 2009), generalizing at the same time an unpublished method due to Griewank (Technical Report NA 12, 1981, DAMTP, University of Cambridge), an algorithm by Nesterov and Polyak (Math Program 108(1):177–205, 2006) and a proposal by Weiser, Deuflhard and Erdmann (Optim Methods Softw 22(3):413–431, 2007). In this companion paper, we further the analysis by providing worst-case global iteration complexity bounds for ARC and a second-order variant to achieve approximate first-order, and for the latter second-order, criticality of the iterates. In particular, the second-order ARC algorithm requires at most @math iterations, or equivalently, function- and gradient-evaluations, to drive the norm of the gradient of the objective below the desired accuracy @math , and @math iterations, to reach approximate nonnegative curvature in a subspace. The orders of these bounds match those proved for Algorithm 3.3 of Nesterov and Polyak which minimizes the cubic model globally on each iteration. Our approach is more general in that it allows the cubic model to be solved only approximately and may employ approximate Hessians.
summary: A fundamental concern in the design of non-convex optimization algorithms for finding a SSP is how to escape from saddle points. The proposed first-order method dubbed addresses this concern by extracting the negative curvature from a Hessian matrix with negative eigen-values. It is inspired by a recent work , which is the first work that develops a first-order method (named ) for extracting negative curvature from a Hessian matrix with negative eigen-values. Their method is a gradient descent method and suffers from an iteration complexity of @math for finding a negative curvature for a Hessian matrix whose minimum eigen-value is less than @math . In contrast, the proposed @math is based on PHB or NAG and improves the iteration complexity of to @math . By utilizing @math in the framework developed by @cite_6 , we obtain an AG algorithm for finding an @math -SSP with an iteration complexity of @math . As a byproduct, can be also leveraged in stochastic non-convex optimization to accelerate the convergence for finding a SSP.