## Affine invariant convergence rates of the conditional gradient method

We show that the conditional gradient method for the convex composite problem $\min_x\{f(x) + \Psi(x)\}$ generates primal and dual iterates with a duality gap converging to zero provided a suitable growth property holds and the algorithm makes a judicious choice of stepsizes. The rate of convergence of the duality gap to zero ranges from sublinear … Read more

## Frank-Wolfe and friends: a journey into projection-free first-order optimization methods

Invented some 65 years ago in a seminal paper by Marguerite Straus-Frank and Philip Wolfe, the Frank-Wolfe method recently enjoys a remarkable revival, fuelled by the need of fast and reliable first-order optimization methods in Data Science and other relevant application areas. This review tries to explain the success of this approach by illustrating versatility … Read more

## Universal Conditional Gradient Sliding for Convex Optimization

In this paper, we present a first-order projection-free method, namely, the universal conditional gradient sliding (UCGS) method, for solving ε-approximate solutions to convex differentiable optimization problems. For objective functions with Hölder continuous gradients, we show that UCGS is able to terminate with ε-solutions with at most O((1/ε)^(2/(1+3v))) gradient evaluations and O((1/ε)^(4/(1+3v))) linear objective optimizations, where … Read more

## Generalized conditional subgradient and generalized mirror descent: duality, convergence, and symmetry

We provide new insight into a generalized conditional subgradient algorithm and a generalized mirror descent algorithm for the convex minimization problem $\min_x \; \{f(Ax) + h(x)\}.$ As Bach showed in [SIAM J. Optim., 25 (2015), pp. 115–129], applying either of these two algorithms to this problem is equivalent to applying the other one to its … Read more

## Zeroth-order Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization: Handling Constraints, High-Dimensionality, and Saddle-Points

In this paper, we propose and analyze zeroth-order stochastic approximation algorithms for nonconvex and convex optimization, with a focus on addressing constrained optimization, high-dimensional setting, and saddle-point avoiding. To handle constrained optimization, we first propose generalizations of the conditional gradient algorithm achieving rates similar to the standard stochastic gradient algorithm using only zeroth-order information. To … Read more

## Generalized Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Algorithm with Stochastic “Substitute” Gradient for Structured Convex Optimization

The stochastic Frank-Wolfe method has recently attracted much general interest in the context of optimization for statistical and machine learning due to its ability to work with a more general feasible region. However, there has been a complexity gap in the guaranteed convergence rate for stochastic Frank-Wolfe compared to its deterministic counterpart. In this work, … Read more

## Globally Solving the Trust Region Subproblem Using Simple First-Order Methods

We consider the trust region subproblem which is given by a minimization of a quadratic, not necessarily convex, function over the Euclidean ball. Based on the well-known second-order necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for this problem, we present two sufficient optimality conditions defined solely in terms of the primal variables. Each of these conditions corresponds … Read more

## Complexity bounds for primal-dual methods minimizing the model of objective function

We provide Frank-Wolfe ($\equiv$ Conditional Gradients) method with a convergence analysis allowing to approach a primal-dual solution of convex optimization problem with composite objective function. Additional properties of complementary part of the objective (strong convexity) significantly accelerate the scheme. We also justify a new variant of this method, which can be seen as a trust-region … Read more

## Exact Worst-case Performance of First-order Methods for Composite Convex Optimization

We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected, proximal, conditional and inexact (sub)gradient steps. We simultaneously obtain tight worst-case guarantees and explicit instances of optimization problems on which the algorithm reaches this … Read more

## Structured Nonconvex and Nonsmooth Optimization: Algorithms and Iteration Complexity Analysis

Nonconvex optimization problems are frequently encountered in much of statistics, business, science and engineering, but they are not yet widely recognized as a technology. A reason for this relatively low degree of popularity is the lack of a well developed system of theory and algorithms to support the applications, as is the case for its … Read more