Paper:
Gradient Descent Can Take Exponential Time to Escape Saddle Points
Although gradient descent (GD) almost always escapes saddle points asymptotically , this paper shows that even with fairly natural random initialization schemes and non-pathological functions, GD can be significantly slowed down by saddle points, taking exponential time to escape. On the other hand, gradient descent with perturbations [Ge et al., 2015 is not slowed down by saddle points-it can find an approximate local minimizer in polynomial time. This result implies that GD is inherently slower than perturbed GD, and justifies the importance of adding perturbations for efficient non-convex optimization. While our focus is theoretical, we also present experiments that illustrate our theoretical findings.

Review:
It has recently been shown that, when all the saddle points of a non-convex function are "strict saddle", then gradient descent with a (reasonable) random initialization converges to a local minimizer with probability one. For a randomly perturbed version of gradient descent, the convergence rate can additionally be shown to be polynomial in the parameters. This article proves that such a convergence rate does not hold for the non-perturbed version: there exists reasonably smooth functions with only strict saddle points, and natural initialization schemes such that gradient descent requires a number of steps that is exponential in the dimension to find a local minimum.
I liked this article very much. It answers a very natural question: gradient descent is an extremely classical, and very simple algorithm. Although it is known not to be the fastest one in many situations, it is widely used in practice; we need to understand its convergence rate. The proof is also conceptually simple and elegant, and I found its presentation very clear.
My only criticism is that it seems to me that there are a lot of miscalculations in the proof, notably in the proof of Lemma B.2. I absolutely do not think they are a problem for the correctness of the proof, but I would appreciate them to be corrected before the article is published.
Minor remarks and typos:
- l.91: "postpone in" should be "postpone to"
- l.109: ""strict" defined" should be ""strict", which is defined"?
- l.115: "the approximation to" should be "approximate"?
- Paragraph "initialize far, far away": some condition on h is needed to ensure that x_2 does not suddenly increase when x_1 is between -2 and -1. (I understand that this discussion is informal anyway, but it could be briefly mentioned.)
- l.163: "in previous" should be "as in previous"
- l.166: why [-1/2;1/2] and not [-1;1]?
- l.167: "has" should be "have"
- l.173: "from of" should be "from"
- l.191: no comma before the closing parenthesis
- Corollary 4.3: "The for"? "satisfies" should be "that satisfies"; "same of" should be "same as in"
- l.217: "Guassian"
- l.218, "where ...": a verb is missing.
- Equation (3), second and third line, right hand side: x should be x_1.
- l.241: "still satisfy the assumptions" should be "the assumptions are still satisfied"
- l.250: "constraint" should be "constrained"
- l.251 and 438: "make as" should be "make"?
- l.252: remove "both coordinate".
- l.261: "(14)and" should be "(14) and"
- l.281: "when if" should be "if"
- I know that the conjunction "that" can often be omitted after verbs like "know", "note", "imply" ... However, I would personally find the sentences easier to understand if "that" was not omitted when it introduces a complex proposition (lines 274, 388, 391 ...).
- l.367: I do not understand "We connnect ... in a spline".
- l.376: "where" should be "which"
- Page 12: the number of the figure should be written in the caption.
- l.397: "above lemma" should be "lemma below"
- l.403: remove "for GD"
- l.406: "the iterate" should be "the iterates"
- Page 13: it seems to me that we need to know that the iterates stay in D_0 in order for the first equations (after line 414) to be valid (which is proved after the equations).
- Equation after l.421, second line: I think that the inequality given by Lemma B.2 yields a \geq, not \leq.
- Line after this equation: "where the" should be "where for the".
- Equation after l.426, second line: a "2" is missing.
- I do not think that the definition in Equation (12) is correct (because, with this definition, D_a does not depend on a).
- Equation between (15) and (16): shouldn't a distinction also be made on the sign of x_{i+1}?
- Step 2: why couldn't we simply define f(x_1,\dots,x_d) by f(x_1,\dots,x_d)=f(|x_1|,\dots,|x_d|)? It seems to me that it is more or less what is done, but written in a more complicated way. Maybe I did not understand this part.
- l.460: "agree" should be "agree with"
- l.471: maybe also say that there is no noise added when \tau \leq x_k\leq 2\tau?
- l.472: I think the assumption should be r \leq \tau/20.
- l.478: "same argument" should be "same argument as"
- l.496: the comma should be on the previous line.
- Theorem B.1: the assumption that f'(y_0)\leq 0 is also needed in order to ensure p(y) \leq f(y_0).
- According to my computations, g_1''(\tau) is equal to -4\gamma, while the continuity assumption on the first derivative requires -2\gamma.
- l.521: I do not see why -g_1(2\tau)+4L\tau^2 is equal to (17\gamma/6+11 L/2)\tau^2.
- I do not see why \nabla f_{i,2} is equal to \nabla f_{i+1,1} (for the derivative along x_i, I do not find the same value).
- Theorem B.3: it seems to me that this is an over-simplification of [Chang, 2015, Theorem 1.3] (in particular, but not only, because I think that the notion of C^m functions does not really make sense on generic closed subsets of \R^d).