Complex Momentum for Optimization in Games

We generalize gradient descent with momentum for optimization in differentiable games to have complex-valued momentum. We give theoretical motivation for our method by proving convergence on bilinear zero-sum games for simultaneous and alternating updates. Our method gives real-valued parameter updates, making it a drop-in replacement for standard optimizers. We empirically demonstrate that complex-valued momentum can improve convergence in realistic adversarial games—like generative adversarial networks—by showing we can find better solutions with an almost identical computational cost. We also show a practical generalization to a complex-valued Adam variant, which we use to train BigGAN to better inception scores on CIFAR-10.