Complexity of trust-region methods in the presence of unbounded Hessian approximations
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We extend traditional complexity analyses of trust-region methods for unconstrained, possibly nonconvex, optimization. Whereas most complexity analyses assume uniform boundedness of the model Hessians, we work with potentially unbounded model Hessians. Boundedness is not guaranteed in practical implementations, in particular ones based on quasi-Newton updates such as PSB, BFGS and SR1. We examine two regimes of Hessian growth: one bounded by a power of the number of successful iterations, and one bounded by a power of the number of iterations. This allows us to formalize and address the intuition of Powell [IMA J. Numer. Ana. 30(1):289-301,2010], who studied convergence under a special case of our assumptions, but whose proof contained complexity arguments. Specifically, for \(0 \leq p < 1\), we establish sharp \(O([(1-p)ε^{-2}]^{1/(1-p)})\) evaluation complexity to find an \(ε\)-stationary point when model Hessians are \(O(|\mathcal{S}_{k-1}|^p)\), where \(|\mathcal{S}_{k-1}|\) is the number of iterations where the step was accepted, up to iteration \(k-1\). For \(p = 1\), which is the case studied by Powell, we establish a sharp \(O(\exp(c_1ε^{-2}))\) evaluation complexity for a certain constant \(c_1 > 0\). This is far better than the double exponential bound that \citet{powell-2010} suspected, and is far worse than other bounds surmised elsewhere in the literature. We establish similar sharp bounds when model Hessians are \(O(k^p)\), where \(k\) is the iteration counter, for \(0 \leq p < 1\). When \(p = 1\), the complexity bound depends on the parameters of the family, but reduces to \(O((1 - \log(ε))\exp(c_2ε^{-2}))\) for a certain constant \(c_2 > 0\) for the special case of the standard trust-region method. As special cases, we derive novel complexity bounds for (strongly) convex objectives under the same growth assumptions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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