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

Using orthogonally structured positive bases for constructing positive k-spanning sets with cosine measure guarantees

Positive spanning sets span a given vector space by nonnegative linear combinations of their elements. These have attracted significant attention in recent years, owing to their extensive use in derivative-free optimization. In this setting, the quality of a positive spanning set is assessed through its cosine measure, a geometric quantity that expresses how well such … 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

Limited memory gradient methods for unconstrained optimization

The limited memory steepest descent method (Fletcher, 2012) for unconstrained optimization problems stores a few past gradients to compute multiple stepsizes at once. We review this method and propose new variants. For strictly convex quadratic objective functions, we study the numerical behavior of different techniques to compute new stepsizes. In particular, we introduce a method … 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

Inexact Newton methods with matrix approximation by sampling for nonlinear least-squares and systems

We develop and analyze stochastic inexact Gauss-Newton methods for nonlinear least-squares problems and inexact Newton methods for nonlinear systems of equations. Random models are formed using suitable sampling strategies for the matrices involved in the deterministic models. The analysis of the expected number of iterations needed in the worst case to achieve a desired level … 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

Expected decrease for derivative-free algorithms using random subspaces

Derivative-free algorithms seek the minimum of a given function based only on function values queried at appropriate points. Although these methods are widely used in practice, their performance is known to worsen as the problem dimension increases. Recent advances in developing randomized derivative-free techniques have tackled this issue by working in low-dimensional subspaces that are … Read more

Almost-sure convergence of iterates and multipliers in stochastic sequential quadratic optimization

Stochastic sequential quadratic optimization (SQP) methods for solving continuous optimization problems with nonlinear equality constraints have attracted attention recently, such as for solving large-scale data-fitting problems subject to nonconvex constraints. However, for a recently proposed subclass of such methods that is built on the popular stochastic-gradient methodology from the unconstrained setting, convergence guarantees have been … 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