Asymptotic Study of Stochastic Adaptive Algorithms in Non-convex Landscape

This paper studies some asymptotic properties of adaptive algorithms widely used in opti-mization and machine learning, and among them Adagrad and Rmsprop, which are involved in most of the blackbox deep learning algorithms. Our setup is the non-convex landscape optimization point of view, we consider a one time scale parametrization and the situation where these algorithms may or may not be used with mini-batches. We adopt the point of view of stochastic algorithms and establish the almost sure convergence of these methods when using a decreasing step-size towards the set of critical points of the target function. With a mild extra assumption on the noise, we also obtain the convergence towards the set of minimizers of the function. Along our study, we also obtain a "convergence rate" of the methods, in the vein of the works of Ghadimi and Lan (2013).