Bregman primal–dual first-order method and application to sparse semidefinite programming

We present a new variant of the Chambolle–Pock primal–dual method with Bregman distances, analyze its convergence, and apply it to the centering problem in sparse semidefinite programming. The novelty in the method is a line search procedure for selecting suitable step sizes. The line search obviates the need for estimating the norm of the constraint … Read more

Geometry of First-Order Methods and Adaptive Acceleration

First-order operator splitting methods are ubiquitous among many fields through science and engineering, such as inverse problems, signal/image processing, statistics, data science and machine learning, to name a few. In this paper, we study a geometric property of first-order methods when applying to solve non-smooth optimization problems. With the tool of “partial smoothness”, we design … Read more

Coordinate Descent Without Coordinates: Tangent Subspace Descent on Riemannian Manifolds

We extend coordinate descent to manifold domains, and provide convergence analyses for geodesically convex and non-convex smooth objective functions. Our key insight is to draw an analogy between coordinate blocks in Euclidean space and tangent subspaces of a manifold. Hence, our method is called tangent subspace descent (TSD). The core principle behind ensuring convergence of … Read more

An accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving nonconvex-concave min-max problems

Abstract This paper presents a quadratic-penalty type method for solving linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max problems. The method consists of solving a sequence of penalty subproblems which, due to the min-max structure of the problem, are potentially nonsmooth but can be approximated by smooth composite nonconvex minimization problems. Each of these penalty subproblems is then solved … Read more

A FISTA-type accelerated gradient algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems

In this paper, we describe and establish iteration-complexity of two accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variants to solve a smooth nonconvex composite optimization problem whose objective function is the sum of a nonconvex differentiable function f with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and a simple nonsmooth closed convex function h. When f is convex, the first ACG … Read more

General Convergence Rates Follow From Specialized Rates Assuming Growth Bounds

Often in the analysis of first-order methods, assuming the existence of a quadratic growth bound (a generalization of strong convexity) facilitates much stronger convergence analysis. Hence the analysis is done twice, once for the general case and once for the growth bounded case. We give a meta-theorem for deriving general convergence rates from those assuming … Read more

Line search and convergence in bound-constrained optimization

The first part of this paper discusses convergence properties of a new line search method for the optimization of continuously differentiable functions with Lipschitz continuous gradient. The line search uses (apart from the gradient at the current best point) function values only. After deriving properties of the new, in general curved, line search, global convergence … Read more

The condition number of a function relative to a set

The condition number of a differentiable convex function, namely the ratio of its smoothness to strong convexity constants, is closely tied to fundamental properties of the function. In particular, the condition number of a quadratic convex function is the square of the aspect ratio of a canonical ellipsoid associated to the function. Furthermore, the condition … Read more

A unified framework for Bregman proximal methods: subgradient, gradient, and accelerated gradient schemes

We provide a unified framework for analyzing the convergence of Bregman proximal first-order algorithms for convex minimization. Our framework hinges on properties of the convex conjugate and gives novel proofs of the convergence rates of the Bregman proximal subgradient, Bregman proximal gradient, and a new accelerated Bregman proximal gradient algorithm under fairly general and mild … Read more

An efficient adaptive accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving linearly constrained nonconvex composite problems

This paper proposes an efficient adaptive variant of a quadratic penalty accelerated inexact proximal point (QP-AIPP) method proposed earlier by the authors. Both the QP-AIPP method and its variant solve linearly constrained nonconvex composite optimization problems using a quadratic penalty approach where the generated penalized subproblems are solved by a variant of the underlying AIPP … Read more