Lower bounds for non-convex stochastic optimization

We lower bound the complexity of finding ϵ-stationary points (with gradient norm at most ϵ) using stochastic first-order methods. In a well-studied model where algorithms access smooth, potentially non-convex functions through queries to an unbiased stochastic gradient oracle with bounded variance, we prove that (in the worst case) any algorithm requires at least ϵ^{- 4} queries to find an ϵ-stationary point. The lower bound is tight, and establishes that stochastic gradient descent is minimax optimal in this model. In a more restrictive model where the noisy gradient estimates satisfy a mean-squared smoothness property, we prove a lower bound of ϵ^{- 3} queries, establishing the optimality of recently proposed variance reduction techniques.