A Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method with Progressive Variance Reduction

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole objective function is strongly convex. Such problems often arise in machine learning, known … Read more

Intermediate gradient methods for smooth convex problems with inexact oracle

Between the robust but slow (primal or dual) gradient methods and the fast but sensitive to errors fast gradient methods, our goal in this paper is to develop first-order methods for smooth convex problems with intermediate speed and intermediate sensitivity to errors. We develop a general family of first-order methods, the Intermediate Gradient Method (IGM), … Read more

First-order methods with inexact oracle: the strongly convex case

The goal of this paper is to study the effect of inexact first-order information on the first-order methods designed for smooth strongly convex optimization problems. We introduce the notion of (delta,L,mu)-oracle, that can be seen as an extension of the inexact (delta,L)-oracle previously introduced, taking into account strong convexity. We consider different examples of (delta,L,mu)-oracle: … Read more

Equivariant Perturbation in Gomory and Johnson’s Infinite Group Problem. III. Foundations for the k-Dimensional Case with Applications to k=2

We develop foundational tools for classifying the extreme valid functions for the k-dimensional infinite group problem. In particular, (1) we present the general regular solution to Cauchy’s additive functional equation on bounded convex domains. This provides a k-dimensional generalization of the so-called interval lemma, allowing us to deduce affine properties of the function from certain … Read more

Parallel Multi-Block ADMM with o(1/k) Convergence

This paper introduces a parallel and distributed extension to the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The algorithm decomposes the original problem into N smaller subproblems and solves them in parallel at each iteration. This Jacobian-type algorithm is well suited for distributed computing and is particularly attractive for solving certain large-scale problems. This paper introduces … Read more

A Characterization of Irreducible Infeasible Subsystems in Flow Networks

Infeasible network flow problems with supplies and demands can be characterized via violated cut-inequalities of the classical Gale-Hoffman theorem. Written as a linear program, irreducible infeasible subsystems (IISs) provide a different means of infeasibility characterization. In this article, we answer a question left open in the literature, by showing a one-to-one correspondence between IISs and … Read more

Accelerated Schemes For A Class of Variational Inequalities

We propose a novel method, namely the accelerated mirror-prox (AMP) method, for computing the weak solutions of a class of deterministic and stochastic monotone variational inequalities (VI). The main idea of this algorithm is to incorporate a multi-step acceleration scheme into the mirror-prox method. For both deterministic and stochastic VIs, the developed AMP method computes … Read more

Asynchronous Stochastic Coordinate Descent: Parallelism and Convergence Properties

We describe an asynchronous parallel stochastic proximal coordinate descent algorithm for minimizing a composite objective function, which consists of a smooth convex function plus a separable convex function. In contrast to previous analyses, our model of asynchronous computation accounts for the fact that components of the unknown vector may be written by some cores simultaneously … Read more

On solving symmetric systems of linear equations in an unnormalized Krylov subspace framework

In an unnormalized Krylov subspace framework for solving symmetric systems of linear equations, the orthogonal vectors that are generated by a Lanczos process are not necessarily on the form of gradients. Associating each orthogonal vector with a triple, and using only the three-term recurrences of the triples, we give conditions on whether a symmetric system … Read more

A modified limited-memory BNS method for unconstrained minimization based on the conjugate directions idea

A modification of the limited-memory variable metric BNS method for large scale unconstrained optimization is proposed, which consist in corrections (derived from the idea of conjugate directions) of the used difference vectors for better satisfaction of previous quasi-Newton conditions. In comparison with [16], where a similar approach is used, correction vectors from more previous iterations … Read more