arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Aziz Ben Nejma.
In this paper, we establish the low-temperature asymptotics of the Poincar\'e inequality constant for a class of convex potentials satisfying a {\L}ojasiewicz inequality. In addition, we disprove a conjecture previously posed by Chewi and Stromme on the low-temperature asymptotics of the log-Sobolev constant and determine the correct asymptotic behavior in dimension one.
The Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) inequality extends the favorable optimization properties of strongly convex functions to a broader class of functions. In this paper, we prove a theorem (also obtained by Criscitiello, Rebjock and Boumal in an earlier blog post) showing that the richness of the class of P{\L} functions is rooted in the nonsmooth case since sufficient regularity forces them to be essentially strongly convex. More precisely, we prove that if $f$ is a $C^2$ P{\L} function having a bounded set of minimizers, then it has a unique minimizer and is strongly convex on a sublevel set of the form $\{f\leq a\}$. We show that this implies a result of Asplund on properties of the squared distance function, and discuss some consequences on smoothness assumptions in results in the literature.