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Poster
SAPD+: An Accelerated Stochastic Method for Nonconvex-Concave Minimax Problems
Xuan Zhang · Necdet Serhat Aybat · Mert Gurbuzbalaban

Tue Nov 29 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Hall J #823
We propose a new stochastic method SAPD+ for solving nonconvex-concave minimax problems of the form $\min\max\mathcal{L}(x,y)=f(x)+\Phi(x,y)-g(y)$, where $f,g$ are closed convex and $\Phi(x,y)$ is a smooth function that is weakly convex in $x$, (strongly) concave in $y$. For both strongly concave and merely concave settings, SAPD+ achieves the best known oracle complexities of $\mathcal{O}(L\kappa_y\epsilon^{-4})$ and $\mathcal{O}(L^3\epsilon^{-6})$, respectively, without assuming compactness of the problem domain, where $\kappa_y$ is the condition number, and $L$ is the Lipschitz constant. We also propose SAPD+ with variance reduction, which enjoys the best known oracle complexity of $\mathcal{O}(L\kappa_y^2\epsilon^{-3})$ for weakly convex-strongly concave setting. We demonstrate the efficiency of SAPD+ on a distributionally robust learning problem with a nonconvex regularizer and also on a multi-class classification problem in deep learning.