NEON+: Accelerated Gradient Methods for Extracting Negative Curvature for Non-Convex Optimization

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~footnotethis is in contrast to a single-loop AG algorithm proposed in a recent manuscript~citepAGNON, 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~citepNEON17 and is based on a different novel analysis., which converges to second-order stationary point x such that |nabla f(x)|≤ ε and nabla2 f(x)≥ -√ε I with widetilde O(1/ε1.75) iteration complexity, improving that of gradient descent method by a factor of ε-0.25 and matching the best iteration complexity of second-order Hessian-free methods for non-convex optimization.