Finding Approximate Local Minima for Nonconvex Optimization in Linear Time

We design a non-convex second-order optimization algorithm that is guaranteed to return an approximate local minimum in time which is linear in the input representation. The time complexity of our algorithm to find an approximate local minimum is even faster than that of gradient descent to find a critical point. Our algorithm applies to a general class of optimization problems including training a neural network and other non-convex objectives arising in machine learning.