Convergence of Proximal Point and Extragradient-Based Methods Beyond Monotonicity: the Case of Negative Comonotonicity

Algorithms for min-max optimization and variational inequalities are often studied under monotonicity assumptions. Motivated by nonmonotone machine learning applications, we follow the line of works (Diakonikolas et al., 2021; Lee & Kim, 2021; Pethick et al., 2022; Böhm, 2022) aiming at going beyond monotonicity by considering the weaker negative comonotonicity assumption. In this work, we provide tight complexity analyses for the Proximal Point (PP), Extragradient (EG), and Optimistic Gradient (OG) methods in this setup, closing several questions on their working guarantees beyond monotonicity. In particular, we derive the first non-asymptotic convergence rates for PP under negative comonotonicity and star-negative comonotonicity and show their tightness via constructing worst-case examples; we also relax the assumptions for the last-iterate convergence guarantees for EG and OG and prove the tightness of the existing bestiterate guarantees for EG and OG via constructing counter-examples.