Improved second-order evaluation complexity for unconstrained nonlinear optimization using high-order regularized models C. Cartis, N. I. M. Gould and Ph. L. Toint naXys techreport, naXys, University of Namur, Namur (B), 2017 The unconstrained minimization of a sufficiently smooth objective function f(x) is considered, for which derivatives up to order p, p >= 2, are assumed to be available. An adaptive regularization algorithm is proposed that uses Taylor models of the objective of order p and that is guaranteed to find a first- and second-order critical point in at most O(max(\epsilon_1^{-(p+1)/p},\epsilon_2^{-(p+1)/(p-1)})) function and derivatives evaluations, where\epsilon_1 and \epsilon_2 >0 are prescribed first- and second-order optimality tolerances. Our approach extends the method in Birgin et al. (2016) to finding second-order critical points, and establishes the novel complexity bound for second-order criticality under identical problem assumptions as for first-order, namely, that the p-th derivative tensor is Lipschitz continuous and that f(x) is bounded from below. The evaluation-complexity bound for second-order criticality improves on all such known existing results.