This paper develops and analyzes an accelerated proximal descent method for finding stationary points of nonconvex composite optimization problems. The objective function is of the form $f+h$ where $h$ is a proper closed convex function, $f$ is a differentiable function on the domain of $h$, and $\nabla f$ is Lipschitz continuous on the domain of $h$. The main advantage of this method is that it is "parameter-free" in the sense that it does not require knowledge of the Lipschitz constant of $\nabla f$ or of any global topological properties of $f$. It is shown that the proposed method can obtain an $\varepsilon$-approximate stationary point with iteration complexity bounds that are optimal, up to logarithmic terms over $\varepsilon$, in both the convex and nonconvex settings. Some discussion is also given about how the proposed method can be leveraged in other existing optimization frameworks, such as min-max smoothing and penalty frameworks for constrained programming, to create more specialized parameter-free methods. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to support the practical viability of the method.

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