Second-order methods, which utilize gradients as well as Hessians to optimize a given function, are of major importance in mathematical optimization. In this work, we study the oracle complexity of such methods, or equivalently, the number of iterations required to optimize a function to a given accuracy. Focusing on smooth and convex functions, we derive … Read more
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) — some of the most useful and pervasive optimization problems of the last few decades — often behave pathologically: the optimal values of the primal and dual problems may differ and may not be attained. Such SDPs are theoretically interesting and often impossible to solve. Yet, the pathological SDPs in the literature … Read more
This paper establishes the iteration-complexity of a Jacobi-type non-Euclidean proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving multi-block linearly constrained nonconvex programs. The subproblems of this ADMM variant can be solved in parallel and hence the method has great potential to solve large scale multi-block linearly constrained nonconvex programs. Moreover, our analysis allows the … Read more
Sketching, a dimensionality reduction technique, has received much attention in the statistics community. In this paper, we study sketching in the context of Newton’s method for solving finite-sum optimization problems in which the number of variables and data points are both large. We study two forms of sketching that perform dimensionality reduction in data space: … Read more
In this paper, we study polynomial norms, i.e. norms that are the dth root of a degree-d homogeneous polynomial f. We first show that a necessary and sufficient condition for f^(1/d) to be a norm is for f to be strictly convex, or equivalently, convex and positive definite. Though not all norms come from dth … Read more
Slater’s condition — existence of a “strictly feasible solution” — is a common assumption in conic optimization. Without strict feasibility, first-order optimality conditions may be meaningless, the dual problem may yield little information about the primal, and small changes in the data may render the problem infeasible. Hence, failure of strict feasibility can negatively impact … Read more
The subdifferential calculus for the expectation of nonsmooth random integrands involves many fundamental and challenging problems in stochastic optimization. It is known that for Clarke regular integrands, the Clarke subdifferential equals the expectation of their Clarke subdifferential. In particular, this holds for convex integrands. However, little is known about calculation of Clarke subgradients for the … Read more
In this paper, we extend the improved pointwise iteration-complexity result of a dynamic regularized alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for a new stepsize domain. In this complexity analysis, the stepsize parameter can even be chosen in the interval $(0,2)$ instead of interval $(0,(1+\sqrt{5})/2)$. As usual, our analysis is established by interpreting this ADMM variant … Read more
Due to update the Lagrangian multiplier twice at each iteration, the symmetric alternating direction method of multipliers (S-ADMM) often performs better than other ADMM-type methods. In practice, some proximal terms with positive definite proximal matrices are often added to its subproblems, and it is commonly known that large proximal parameter of the proximal term often … Read more
We propose in this paper a unifying scheme for several algorithms from the literature dedicated to the solving of monotone inclusion problems involving compositions with linear continuous operators in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. We show that a number of primal-dual algorithms for monotone inclusions and also the classical ADMM numerical scheme for convex optimization problems, … Read more