Finding Second-Order Stationary Points in Nonconvex-Strongly-Concave Minimax Optimization

We study the smooth minimax optimization problem $\min{\bf x}\max{\bf y} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, where $f$ is $\ell$-smooth, strongly-concave in ${\bf y}$ but possibly nonconvex in ${\bf x}$. Most of existing works focus on finding the first-order stationary points of the function $f({\bf x},{\bf y})$ or its primal function $P({\bf x})\triangleq \max_{\bf y} f({\bf x},{\bf y})$, but few of them focus on achieving second-order stationary points. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for minimax optimization, called Minimax Cubic Newton (MCN), which could find an $\big(\varepsilon,\kappa^{{1.5}\sqrt{\rho\varepsilon}\,\big)$-second-order} stationary point of $P({\bf x})$ with calling ${\mathcal O}\big(\kappa^{{1.5}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon{-1.5}\big)$} times of second-order oracles and $\tilde{\mathcal O}\big(\kappa^{{2}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon{-1.5}\big)$} times of first-order oracles, where $\kappa$ is the condition number and $\rho$ is the Lipschitz continuous constant for the Hessian of $f({\bf x},{\bf y})$. In addition, we propose an inexact variant of MCN for high-dimensional problems to avoid calling expensive second-order oracles. Instead, our method solves the cubic sub-problem inexactly via gradient descent and matrix Chebyshev expansion. This strategy still obtains the desired approximate second-order stationary point with high probability but only requires $\tilde{\mathcal O}\big(\kappa^{{1.5}\ell\varepsilon{-2}\big)$} Hessian-vector oracle calls and $\tilde{\mathcal O}\big(\kappa^{{2}\sqrt{\rho}\varepsilon{-1.5}\big)$} first-order oracle calls. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers the non-asymptotic convergence behavior of finding second-order stationary points for minimax problems without the convex-concave assumptions.