Parameter-Free Accelerated Quasi-Newton Method for Nonconvex Optimization

Abstract

We propose a quasi-Newton-type method for nonconvex optimization with Lipschitz continuous gradients and Hessians. The algorithm finds an $\varepsilon$-stationary point within $\tilde{\mathrm{O}}(d^{1/4} \varepsilon^{-13/8})$ gradient evaluations, where $d$ is the problem dimension. Although this bound includes an additional logarithmic factor compared with the best known complexity, our method is parameter-free in the sense that it requires no prior knowledge of problem-dependent parameters such as Lipschitz constants or the optimal value. Moreover, it does not need the target accuracy $\varepsilon$ or the total number of iterations to be specified in advance. The result is achieved by combining several key ideas: momentum-based acceleration, quartic regularization for subproblems, and a scaled variant of the Powell-symmetric-Broyden (PSB) update.