Sharp global convergence guarantees for iterative nonconvex optimization with random data
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We consider a general class of regression models with normally distributed covariates, and the associated nonconvex problem of fitting these models from data. We develop a general recipe for analyzing the convergence of iterative algorithms for this task from a random initialization. In particular, provided each iteration can be written as the solution to a convex optimization problem satisfying some natural conditions, we leverage Gaussian comparison theorems to derive a deterministic sequence that provides sharp upper and lower bounds on the error of the algorithm with sample splitting. Crucially, this deterministic sequence accurately captures both the convergence rate of the algorithm and the eventual error floor in the finite-sample regime, and is distinct from the commonly used “population” sequence that results from taking the infinite-sample limit. We apply our general framework to derive several concrete consequences for parameter estimation in popular statistical models including phase retrieval and mixtures of regressions. Provided the sample size scales near linearly in the dimension, we show sharp global convergence rates for both higher-order algorithms based on alternating updates and first-order algorithms based on subgradient descent. These corollaries, in turn, reveal multiple nonstandard phenomena that are then corroborated by extensive numerical experiments.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it