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 Fermat point of a triangle

For a given triangle $\triangle ABC$, Pierre de Fermat posed around 1640 the problem of finding a point $P$ minimizing the sum $s_P$ of the Euclidean distances from $P$ to the vertices $A$, $B$, $C$. Based on geometrical arguments this problem was first solved by Torricelli shortly after, by Simpson in 1750, and by several … Read more

A polynomial algorithm for linear feasibility problems given by separation oracles

The algorithm proposed in this paper runs in a polynomial oracle time, i.e., in a number of arithmetic operations and calls to the separation oracle bounded by a polynomial in the number of variables and in the maximum binary size of an entry of the coefficient matrix. This algorithm is much simpler than traditional polynomial … Read more

Convex Optimization with ALADIN

This paper presents novel convergence results for the Augmented Lagrangian based Alternating Direction Inexact Newton method (ALADIN) in the context of distributed convex optimization. It is shown that ALADIN converges for a large class of convex optimization problems from any starting point to minimizers without needing line-search or other globalization routines. Under additional regularity assumptions, … Read more

Fixing and extending some recent results on the ADMM algorithm

We first point out several flaws in the recent paper {\it [R. Shefi, M. Teboulle: Rate of convergence analysis of decomposition methods based on the proximal method of multipliers for convex minimization, SIAM J. Optim. 24, 269–297, 2014]} that proposes two ADMM-type algorithms for solving convex optimization problems involving compositions with linear operators and show … Read more

Extending the ergodic convergence rate of the proximal ADMM

Pointwise and ergodic iteration-complexity results for the proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for any stepsize in $(0,(1+\sqrt{5})/2)$ have been recently established in the literature. In addition to giving alternative proofs of these results, this paper also extends the ergodic iteration-complexity result to include the case in which the stepsize is equal to $(1+\sqrt{5})/2$. … Read more

A Primal-Dual Homotopy Algorithm for l_1-Minimization with l_inf-Constraints

In this paper we propose a primal-dual homotopy method for $\ell_1$-minimization problems with infinity norm constraints in the context of sparse reconstruction. The natural homotopy parameter is the value of the bound for the constraints and we show that there exists a piecewise linear solution path with finitely many break points for the primal problem … Read more

An Infeasible Active Set Method with Combinatorial Line Search for Convex Quadratic Problems with Bound Constraints

The minimization of a convex quadratic function under bound constraints is a fundamental building block for more complicated optimization problems. The active-set method introduced by [M. Bergounioux, K. Ito, and K. Kunisch. Primal-Dual Strategy for Constrained Optimal Control Problems. SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, 37:1176–1194, 1999.] and [M. Bergounioux, M. Haddou, M. Hintermüller, and … Read more

A universal and structured way to derive dual optimization problem formulations

The dual problem of a convex optimization problem can be obtained in a relatively simple and structural way by using a well-known result in convex analysis, namely Fenchel’s duality theorem. This alternative way of forming a strong dual problem is the subject in this paper. We recall some standard results from convex analysis and then … Read more

Positive-Indefinite Proximal Augmented Lagrangian Method and its Application to Full Jacobian Splitting for Multi-block Separable Convex Minimization Problems

The augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) is fundamental for solving convex programming problems with linear constraints. The proximal version of ALM, which regularizes ALM’s subproblem over the primal variable at each iteration by an additional positive-definite quadratic proximal term, has been well studied in the literature. In this paper, we show that it is not necessary … Read more