Distributed Gradient Descent: Nonconvergence to Saddle Points and the Stable-Manifold Theorem

Abstract: The paper studies a distributed gradient descent (DGD) process and considers the problem of showing that in nonconvex optimization problems, DGD typically converges to local minima rather than saddle points. The paper considers unconstrained minimization of a smooth objective function. In centralized settings, the problem of demonstrating nonconvergence to saddle points of gradient descent (and variants) is typically handled by way of the stable-manifold theorem from classical dynamical systems theory. However, the classical stable-manifold theorem is not applicable in distributed settings. The paper develops an appropriate stable-manifold theorem for DGD showing that convergence to saddle points may only occur from a low-dimensional stable manifold. Under appropriate assumptions (e.g., coercivity), this result implies that DGD typically converges to local minima and not to saddle points.