A restart-free accelerated algorithm for nonconvex minimization: continuous- and discrete-time analysis
We propose two deterministic momentum-based first-order methods for minimizing lower-bounded nonconvex functions with Lipschitz-continuous gradients and Hessians. Both methods attain an $\varepsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point in $O(\varepsilon^{-7/4})$ function and gradient evaluations, and their update parameters do not depend on the target accuracy or a prescribed terminal iteration. The convergence guarantees concern the best point among weighted averages of the iterates. Instead of relying on momentum-resetting restarts, both methods employ a velocity-control mechanism that adaptively reduces the velocity. The first method uses a differentiable velocity-control rule, making its last iterate differentiable with respect to the initial point. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first deterministic first-order method to combine this differentiability property with the stated complexity. The second method adaptively estimates the gradient and Hessian Lipschitz constants and requires no prior knowledge of their values. Numerical experiments show that it outperforms existing parameter-free methods on some test problems. Both methods are derived by discretizing a new continuous-time model described by an ordinary differential equation. We develop parallel continuous- and discrete-time convergence analyses within the performance estimation problem framework.