Trust-Region Newton-CG with Strong Second-Order Complexity Guarantees for Nonconvex Optimization

Worst-case complexity guarantees for nonconvex optimization algorithms have been a topic of growing interest. Multiple frameworks that achieve the best known complexity bounds among a broad class of first- and second-order strategies have been proposed. These methods have often been designed primarily with complexity guarantees in mind and, as a result, represent a departure from the algorithms that have proved to be the most effective in practice. In this paper, we consider trust-region Newton methods, one of the most popular classes of algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems. By introducing slight modifications to the original scheme, we obtain two methods---one based on exact subproblem solves and one exploiting inexact subproblem solves as in the popular ``trust-region Newton-Conjugate-Gradient'' (trust-region Newton-CG) method---with iteration and operation complexity bounds that match the best known bounds for the aforementioned class of first- and second-order methods. The resulting trust-region Newton-CG method also retains the attractive practical behavior of classical trust-region Newton-CG, which we demonstrate with numerical comparisons on a standard benchmark test set.

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Lehigh ISE Technical Report 19T-028

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