Poster
Tue Dec 10 05:30 PM -- 07:30 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #125
SSRGD: Simple Stochastic Recursive Gradient Descent for Escaping Saddle Points
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 unstable saddle points.
We show that a simple perturbed version of stochastic recursive gradient descent algorithm (called SSRGD) can find an -second-order stationary point with stochastic gradient complexity for nonconvex finite-sum problems.
As a by-product, SSRGD finds an -first-order stationary point with stochastic gradients. These results are almost optimal since Fang et al. [2018] provided a lower bound for finding even just an -first-order stationary point.
We emphasize that SSRGD algorithm for finding second-order stationary points is as simple as for finding first-order stationary points just by adding a uniform perturbation sometimes, while all other algorithms for finding second-order stationary points with similar gradient complexity need to combine with a negative-curvature search subroutine (e.g., Neon2 [Allen-Zhu and Li, 2018]).
Moreover, the simple SSRGD algorithm gets a simpler analysis.
Besides, we also extend our results from nonconvex finite-sum problems to nonconvex online (expectation) problems, and prove the corresponding convergence results.