The proximal alternating direction method of multipliers in the nonconvex setting: convergence analysis and rates

We propose two numerical algorithms for minimizing the sum of a smooth function and the composition of a nonsmooth function with a linear operator in the fully nonconvex setting. The iterative schemes are formulated in the spirit of the proximal and, respectively, proximal linearized alternating direction method of multipliers. The proximal terms are introduced through … Read more

A projection algorithm based on KKT conditions for convex quadratic semidefinite programming with nonnegative constraints

The dual form of convex quadratic semidefinite programming (CQSDP) problem, with nonnegative constraints, is a 4-block separable convex optimization problem. It is known that,the directly extended 4-block alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM4d) is very efficient to solve the dual, but its convergence is not guaranteed. In this paper, we reformulate the dual as a … Read more

Convergent Prediction-Correction-based ADMM for multi-block separable convex programming

The direct extension of the classic alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMMe) to the multi-block separable convex optimization problem is not necessarily convergent, though it often performs very well in practice. In order to preserve the numerical advantages of ADMMe and obtain convergence, many modified ADMM were proposed by correcting the output of ADMMe or … Read more

On the Optimal Proximal Parameter of an ADMM-like Splitting Method for Separable Convex Programming

An ADMM-based splitting method is proposed in [11] for solving convex minimization problems with linear constraints and multi-block separable objective functions; while a relatively large proximal parameter is required for theoretically ensuring the convergence. In this paper, we further study this method and find its optimal (smallest) proximal parameter. For succinctness, we focus on the … Read more

Non-smooth Non-convex Bregman Minimization: Unification and new Algorithms

We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This approximate minimizer of the model function yields a descent direction, along which the next iterate is found. Complemented with an Armijo-like line search … Read more

A Novel Approach for Solving Convex Problems with Cardinality Constraints

In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing a convex differentiable function subject to sparsity constraints. Such constraints are non-convex and the resulting optimization problem is known to be hard to solve. We propose a novel generalization of this problem and demonstrate that it is equivalent to the original sparsity-constrained problem if a certain … Read more

Convergence Study on the Proximal Alternating Direction Method with Larger Step Size

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular method for the separable convex programming with linear constraints, and the proximal ADMM is its important variant. Previous studies show that the relaxation factor $\gamma\in (0, \frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2})$ by Fortin and Glowinski for the ADMM is also valid for the proximal ADMM. In this paper, we … Read more

On the Convergence of Asynchronous Parallel Iteration with Arbitrary Delays

Recent years have witnessed the surge of asynchronous parallel (async-parallel) iterative algorithms due to problems involving very large-scale data and a large number of decision variables. Because of asynchrony, the iterates are computed with outdated information, and the age of the outdated information, which we call \emph{delay}, is the number of times it has been … Read more

A general double-proximal gradient algorithm for d.c. programming

The possibilities of exploiting the special structure of d.c. programs, which consist of optimizing the difference of convex functions, are currently more or less limited to variants of the DCA proposed by Pham Dinh Tao and Le Thi Hoai An in 1997. These assume that either the convex or the concave part, or both, are … Read more

Improving an ADMM-like Splitting Method via Positive-Indefinite Proximal Regularization for Three-Block Separable Convex Minimization

The augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) is fundamental for solving convex minimization models with linear constraints. When the objective function is separable such that it can be represented as the sum of more than one function without coupled variables, various splitting versions of the ALM have been well studied in the literature such as the alternating … Read more