A fast and simple modification of Newton's method helping to avoid saddle points

Abstract: We propose in this paper New Q-Newton's method. The update rule is very simple conceptually, for example $x_{n+1}=x_n-w_n$ where $w_n=pr_{A_n,+}(v_n)-pr_{A_n,-}(v_n)$, with $A_n=\nabla ^2f(x_n)+\delta n||\nabla f(x_n)||^2.Id$ and $v_n=A_n^{-1}.\nabla f(x_n)$. Here $\delta _n$ is an appropriate real number so that $A_n$ is invertible, and $pr{A_n,\pm}$ are projections to the vector subspaces generated by eigenvectors of positive (correspondingly negative) eigenvalues of $A_n$. The main result of this paper roughly says that if $f$ is $C^3$ (can be unbounded from below) and a sequence ${x_n}$, constructed by the New Q-Newton's method from a random initial point $x_0$, {\bf converges}, then the limit point is a critical point and is not a saddle point, and the convergence rate is the same as that of Newton's method. The first author has recently been successful incorporating Backtracking line search to New Q-Newton's method, thus resolving the convergence guarantee issue observed for some (non-smooth) cost functions. An application to quickly finding zeros of a univariate meromorphic function will be discussed. Various experiments are performed, against well known algorithms such as BFGS and Adaptive Cubic Regularization are presented.