Accelerated Gradient Descent via Long Steps

Recently Grimmer [1] showed for smooth convex optimization by utilizing longer steps periodically, gradient descent’s state-of-the-art O(1/T) convergence guarantees can be improved by constant factors, conjecturing an accelerated rate strictly faster than O(1/T) could be possible. Here we prove such a big-O gain, establishing gradient descent’s first accelerated convergence rate in this setting. Namely, we … Read more

Self-concordant smoothing in proximal quasi-Newton algorithms for large-scale convex composite optimization

We introduce a notion of self-concordant smoothing for minimizing the sum of two convex functions, one of which is smooth and the other nonsmooth. The key highlight is a natural property of the resulting problem’s structure that yields a variable metric selection method and a step length rule especially suited to proximal quasi-Newton algorithms. Also, … Read more

Fast convergence of inertial primal-dual dynamics and algorithms for a bilinearly coupled saddle point problem

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

Affine FR : an effective facial reduction algorithm for semidefinite relaxations of combinatorial problems

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 methods. … Read more

Generalized asymmetric forward-backward-adjoint algorithms for convex-concave saddle-point problem

The convex-concave minimax problem, also known as the saddle-point problem, has been extensively studied from various aspects including the algorithm design, convergence condition and complexity. In this paper, we propose a generalized asymmetric forward-backward-adjoint algorithm (G-AFBA) to solve such a problem by utilizing both the proximal techniques and the extrapolation of primal-dual updates. Besides applying … Read more

Adaptive Consensus: A network pruning approach for decentralized optimization

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

Sufficient Conditions for Lipschitzian Error Bounds for Complementarity Systems

We are concerned with Lipschitzian error bounds and Lipschitzian stability properties for solutions of a complementarity system. For this purpose, we deal with a nonsmooth slack-variable reformulation of the complementarity system, and study conditions under which the reformulation serves as a local error bound for the solution set of the complementarity system. We also discuss … Read more

Bilevel Hyperparameter Optimization for Nonlinear Support Vector Machines

While the problem of tuning the hyperparameters of a support vector machine (SVM) via cross-validation is easily understood as a bilevel optimization problem, so far, the corresponding literature has mainly focused on the linear-kernel case. In this paper, we establish a theoretical framework for the development of bilevel optimization-based methods for tuning the hyperparameters of … Read more

Information Complexity of Mixed-integer Convex Optimization

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

Transformation of Bilevel Optimization Problems into Single-Level Ones

Bilevel optimization problems are hierarchical problems with a constraint set which is a subset of the graph of the solution set mapping of a second optimization problem. To investigate their properties and derive solution algorithms, their transformation into single-level ones is necessary. For this, various approaches have been developed. The rst and most often used … Read more