Gradient Methods with Online Scaling Part I. Theoretical Foundations

This paper establishes the theoretical foundations of the online scaled gradient methods (OSGM), a framework that utilizes online learning to adapt stepsizes and provably accelerate first-order methods. OSGM quantifies the effectiveness of a stepsize by a feedback function motivated from a convergence measure and uses the feedback to adjust the stepsize through an online learning … Read more

Provable and Practical Online Learning Rate Adaptation with Hypergradient Descent

This paper investigates the convergence properties of the hypergradient descent method (HDM), a 25-year-old heuristic originally proposed for adaptive stepsize selection in stochastic first-order methods. We provide the first rigorous convergence analysis of HDM using the online learning framework of [Gao24] and apply this analysis to develop new state-of-the-art adaptive gradient methods with empirical and … Read more

When Does Primal Interior Point Method Beat Primal-dual in Linear Optimization?

The primal-dual interior point method (IPM) is widely regarded as the most efficient IPM variant for linear optimization. In this paper, we demonstrate that the improved stability of the pure primal IPM can allow speedups relative to a primal-dual solver, particularly as the IPM approaches convergence.  The stability of the primal scaling matrix makes it … Read more

Gradient Methods with Online Scaling

We introduce a framework to accelerate the convergence of gradient-based methods with online learning. The framework learns to scale the gradient at each iteration through an online learning algorithm and provably accelerates gradient-based methods asymptotically. In contrast with previous literature, where convergence is established based on worst-case analysis, our framework provides a strong convergence guarantee … Read more