Sharp Analysis of Stochastic Optimization under Global Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz Inequality

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We study the complexity of finding the global solution to stochastic nonconvex optimization when the objective function satisfies global Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz (KŁ) inequality and the queries from stochastic gradient oracles satisfy mild expected smoothness assumption. We first introduce a general framework to analyze Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and its associated nonlinear dynamics under the setting.