Can a function cease to decrease even at a non-critical point?

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It was written in a paper I was reading that it might happen that for a minimization problem that the value of the function cease to decrease, but it is not guaranteed to converge to a stable point.

The objective to be minimized was approximating tensors, and the method used was alternating least squared method. How is that possible?

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This depends on the optimization algorithm, if only the gradient of the cost function is taken into account, you can get stuck in a saddle point. For this $\nabla f = 0$, but the solution is not a stable point, Consider the situation

$$ f(x) = x^3 $$

Clearly $df(0)/dx = 0$, but $x=0$ is not a stable point of $f$.

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