\(\) We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other may be nonsmooth. The key highlight of our approach is in a natural property of the resulting problem’s structure which provides us with a variable-metric selection method and a step-length selection … Read more
This paper is devoted to study the convergence rates of a second-order dynamical system and its corresponding discretization associated with a continuously differentiable bilinearly coupled convex-concave saddle point problem. First, we consider the second-order dynamical system with asymptotically vanishing damping term and show the existence and uniqueness of the trajectories as global twice continuously differentiable … Read more
\(\) We develop a new method called \emph{affine FR} for recovering Slater’s condition for semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems. Affine FR is a user-friendly method, as it is fully automatic and only requires a description of the problem. We provide a rigorous analysis of differences between affine FR and the existing … Read more
We consider network-based decentralized optimization problems, where each node in the network possesses a local function and the objective is to collectively attain a consensus solution that minimizes the sum of all the local functions. A major challenge in decentralized optimization is the reliance on communication which remains a considerable bottleneck in many applications. To … Read more
We investigate the information complexity of mixed-integer convex optimization under different types of oracles. We establish new lower bounds for the standard first-order oracle, improving upon the previous best known lower bound. This leaves only a lower order linear term (in the dimension) as the gap between the lower and upper bounds. This is derived … Read more
For multistage stochastic programming problems with stagewise independent uncertainty, dynamic programming algorithms calculate polyhedral approximations for the value functions at each stage. The SDDP algorithm provides piecewise linear lower bounds, in the spirit of the L-shaped algorithm, and corresponding upper bounds took a longer time to appear. One strategy uses the primal dynamic programming recursion … Read more
\(\) We study the convergence of the last iterate in subgradient methods applied to the minimization of a nonsmooth convex function with bounded subgradients. We first introduce a proof technique that generalizes the standard analysis of subgradient methods. It is based on tracking the distance between the current iterate and a different reference point at … Read more
This work establishes provably faster convergence rates for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating descent by analyzing the overall effect of many iterations at once rather than the typical one-iteration inductions used in most first-order method analyses. We … Read more
The backtracking line-search is an effective technique to automatically tune the step-size in smooth optimization. It guarantees similar performance to using the theoretically optimal step-size. Many approaches have been developed to instead tune per-coordinate step-sizes, also known as diagonal preconditioners, but none of the existing methods are provably competitive with the optimal per-coordinate stepsizes. We … Read more
We introduce novel convergence results for asynchronous iterations that appear in the analysis of parallel and distributed optimization algorithms. The results are simple to apply and give explicit estimates for how the degree of asynchrony impacts the convergence rates of the iterates. Our results shorten, streamline and strengthen existing convergence proofs for several asynchronous optimization … Read more