A Practical Relative Error Criterion for Augmented Lagrangians

This paper develops a new error criterion for the approximate minimization of augmented Lagrangian subproblems. This criterion is practical in the sense that it requires only information that is ordinarily readily available, such as the gradient (or a subgradient) of the augmented Lagrangian. It is also “relative” in the sense of relative error criteria for … Read more

Complexity of variants of Tseng’s modified F-B splitting and Korpelevich’s methods for generalized variational inequalities with applications to saddle point and convex optimization problems

In this paper, we consider both a variant of Tseng’s modified forward-backward splitting method and an extension of Korpelevich’s method for solving generalized variational inequalities with Lipschitz continuous operators. By showing that these methods are special cases of the hybrid proximal extragradient (HPE) method introduced by Solodov and Svaiter, we derive iteration-complexity bounds for them … Read more

Optimal Stochastic Approximation Algorithms for Strongly Convex Stochastic Composite Optimization I: a Generic Algorithmic Framework

In this paper we present a generic algorithmic framework, namely, the accelerated stochastic approximation (AC-SA) algorithm, for solving strongly convex stochastic composite optimization (SCO) problems. While the classical stochastic approximation (SA) algorithms are asymptotically optimal for solving differentiable and strongly convex problems, the AC-SA algorithm, when employed with proper stepsize policies, can achieve optimal or … Read more

A splitting method for separate convex programming with linking linear constraints

We consider the separate convex programming problem with linking linear constraints, where the objective function is in the form of the sum of m individual functions without crossed variables. The special case with m=2 has been well studied in the literature and some algorithms are very influential, e.g. the alternating direction method. The research for … Read more

Alternating proximal algorithms for constrained variational inequalities. Application to domain decomposition for PDE’s

Let $\cX,\cY,\cZ$ be real Hilbert spaces, let $f : \cX \rightarrow \R\cup\{+\infty\}$, $g : \cY \rightarrow \R\cup\{+\infty\}$ be closed convex functions and let $A : \cX \rightarrow \cZ$, $B : \cY \rightarrow \cZ$ be linear continuous operators. Let us consider the constrained minimization problem $$ \min\{f(x)+g(y):\quad Ax=By\}.\leqno (\cP)$$ Given a sequence $(\gamma_n)$ which tends toward … Read more

A first-order primal-dual algorithm for convex problems with applications to imaging

In this paper we study a first-order primal-dual algorithm for convex optimization problems with known saddle-point structure. We prove convergence to a saddle-point with rate O(1/N ) in finite dimensions, which is optimal for the complete class of non-smooth problems we are considering in this paper. We further show accelerations of the proposed algorithm to … Read more

Central Swaths (A Generalization of the Central Path)

We develop a natural generalization to the notion of the central path — a notion that lies at the heart of interior-point methods for convex optimization. The generalization is accomplished via the “derivative cones” of a “hyperbolicity cone,” the derivatives being direct and mathematically-appealing relaxations of the underlying (hyperbolic) conic constraint, be it the non-negative … Read more

Information Geometry and Primal-Dual Interior-point Algorithms

In this paper, we study polynomial-time interior-point algorithms in view of information geometry. We introduce an information geometric structure for a conic linear program based on a self-concordant barrier function. Riemannian metric is defined with the Hessian of the barrier function. We introduce two connections $\nabla$ and $\nabla^*$ which roughly corresponds to the primal and … Read more

Sparse optimization with least-squares constraints

The use of convex optimization for the recovery of sparse signals from incomplete or compressed data is now common practice. Motivated by the success of basis pursuit in recovering sparse vectors, new formulations have been proposed that take advantage of different types of sparsity. In this paper we propose an efficient algorithm for solving a … Read more

Linearized augmented Lagrangian and alternating direction methods for nuclear norm minimization

The nuclear norm is widely used to induce low-rank solutions for many optimization problems with matrix variables. Recently, it has been shown that the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) and the alternating direction method (ADM) are very efficient for many convex programming problems arising from various applications, provided that the resulting subproblems are sufficiently simple to … Read more