The Computational Complexity of Finding Second-Order Stationary Points

Authors: Andreas Kontogiannis, Vasilis Pollatos, Sotiris Kanellopoulos, Panayotis Mertikopoulos, Aris Pagourtzis, Ioannis Panageas

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Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical Our main result is that the problem of finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) is PLS-complete, i.e., of the same complexity as the problem of finding first-order stationary points (FOSPs), thus resolving an open question in the field. In particular, our results imply that, under the widely believed complexity conjecture that PLS FNP, finding approximate SOSPs in unconstrained domains is easier than in constrained domains, which is known to be NP-hard. This comes in stark contrast with earlier results which implied that, unless PLS = CLS, finding approximate FOSPs in unconstrained domains is harder than in constrained domains.
Researcher Affiliation Academia 1National Technical University of Athens, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Athens, Greece. 2Archimedes/Athena RC, Greece. 3Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Inria, Grenoble INP, LIG, 38000 Grenoble, France. 4University of California, Irvine, USA.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1: An algorithm for finding an 𝜀-SOSP on an ortho-canonical grid with step 𝛾
Open Source Code No The paper does not provide any statement or link indicating that source code for the described methodology is publicly available.
Open Datasets No The paper is theoretical and does not use or reference any publicly available or open datasets for training or evaluation.
Dataset Splits No The paper is theoretical and does not describe experiments, therefore, no training/validation/test dataset splits are provided.
Hardware Specification No The paper is theoretical and does not describe running experiments, therefore, no specific hardware details are provided.
Software Dependencies No The paper is theoretical and does not describe running experiments, therefore, no specific software dependencies with version numbers are provided.
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and does not describe running experiments, therefore, no specific experimental setup details such as hyperparameters or training configurations are provided.