Unified Convergence Theory of Stochastic and Variance-Reduced Cubic Newton Methods

We establish complexity lower bounds for stochastic first-order algorithms in nonconvex--concave minimax optimization, allowing algorithms to use variance reduction. Our main contribution is a lower bound for a zero-respecting algorithm class that permits variance reduction, extending beyond the algorithmic restrictions imposed by some existing lower bounds. We consider objectives with an $L$-Lipschitz continuous joint gradient, a compact convex dual domain of Euclidean radius at most $D_Y$, and a primal value function, defined by maximizing the objective over the dual variable, with initial suboptimality at most $Δ$. The target accuracy $\varepsilon$ is measured by the gradient norm of the Moreau envelope of the constrained primal value function with parameter $1/(2L)$. Under an unbiased stochastic first-order oracle with variance at most $σ^2$ and mean-square smoothness, we prove the lower bound $Ω\!\left(L^2D_YΔ\varepsilon^{-3}+L^3D_Y^2Δσ^2\varepsilon^{-6}\right)$. This result quantifies the dependence on accuracy, dual-domain radius, and oracle noise even when variance reduction is allowed. We also establish complementary lower bounds for nonconvex--strongly-concave minimax optimization. With dual strong-concavity parameter $μ>0$ and condition number $κ:=L/μ$, we obtain $Ω\!\left(LΔ\sqrtκ\,\varepsilon^{-2}+LΔκσ^2\varepsilon^{-4}\right)$ under the bounded-variance oracle model. Under the additional mean-square smoothness condition with constant $\bar L$, we obtain $Ω\!\left(LΔ\sqrtκ\,\varepsilon^{-2}+Δ\bar Lσκ^{3/2}\varepsilon^{-3}\right)$. Together, these results identify complexity barriers across the concave and strongly concave regimes, with the main nonconvex--concave bound remaining valid for algorithms that use variance reduction.

We propose ALFCG (Adaptive Lipschitz-Free Conditional Gradient), the first adaptive projection-free framework for stochastic composite nonconvex minimization that requires neither global smoothness constants nor line search. Unlike prior conditional gradient methods that use openloop diminishing stepsizes, conservative Lipschitz constants, or costly backtracking, ALFCG maintains a self-normalized accumulator of historical iterate differences to estimate local smoothness and minimize a quadratic surrogate model at each step. This retains the simplicity of Frank-Wolfe while adapting to unknown geometry. We study three variants. ALFCG-FS addresses finite-sum problems with a SPIDER estimator. ALFCG-MVR1 and ALFCG-MVR2 handle stochastic expectation problems by using momentum-based variance reduction with single-batch and two-batch updates, and operate under average and individual smoothness, respectively. To reach an $ε$-stationary point, ALFCG-FS attains $\mathcal{O}(N+\sqrt{N}ε^{-2})$ iteration complexity, while ALFCG-MVR1 and ALFCG-MVR2 achieve $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(σ^2ε^{-4}+ε^{-2})$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(σε^{-3}+ε^{-2})$, where $N$ is the number of components and $σ$ is the noise level. In contrast to typical $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-4})$ or $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$ rates, our bounds reduce to the optimal rate up to logarithmic factors $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(ε^{-2})$ as the noise level $σ\to 0$. Extensive experiments on multiclass classification over nuclear norm balls and $\ell_p$ balls show that ALFCG generally outperforms state-of-the-art conditional gradient baselines.

Lower-bound analyses for nonconvex strongly-concave minimax optimization problems have shown that stochastic first-order algorithms require at least $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ sample complexity to find an $\varepsilon$-stationary point. Some works indicate that this complexity can be improved to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ when the stochastic loss gradient is Lipschitz continuous. The question of achieving enhanced convergence rates under distinct conditions, remains open. In this work, we address this question for optimization problems that are nonconvex in the minimization variable and strongly concave or Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) in the maximization variable. We introduce novel bias-corrected momentum algorithms utilizing efficient Hessian-vector products. We establish convergence conditions and demonstrate a lower iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ for the proposed algorithms. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated through applications to robust logistic regression and robust adaptive cruise control.