Conditioning the complexity of random landscapes on marginal optima

Jaron Kent-Dobias

Published 2024-07-02Version 1

Marginal optima are minima or maxima of a function with many nearly flat directions. In settings with many competing optima, marginal ones tend to attract algorithms and physical dynamics. Often, the important family of marginal attractors are a vanishing minority compared with nonmarginal optima and other unstable stationary points. We introduce a generic technique for conditioning the statistics of stationary points in random landscapes on their marginality, and apply it in three isotropic settings with qualitatively different structure: in the spherical spin-glasses, where the energy is Gaussian and its Hessian is GOE; in multispherical spin glasses, which are Gaussian but non-GOE; and in sums of squared spherical random functions, which are non-Gaussian. In these problems we are able to fully characterize the distribution of marginal optima in the landscape, including when they are in the minority.