Stochastic trust-region and direct-search methods: A weak tail bound condition and reduced sample sizing

Using tail bounds, we introduce a new probabilistic condition for function estimation in stochastic derivative-free optimization which leads to a reduction in the number of samples and eases algorithmic analyses. Moreover, we develop simple stochastic direct-search and trust-region methods for the optimization of a potentially non-smooth function whose values can only be estimated via stochastic … Read more

Survey Descent: A Multipoint Generalization of Gradient Descent for Nonsmooth Optimization

For strongly convex objectives that are smooth, the classical theory of gradient descent ensures linear convergence relative to the number of gradient evaluations. An analogous nonsmooth theory is challenging. Even when the objective is smooth at every iterate, the corresponding local models are unstable and the number of cutting planes invoked by traditional remedies is … Read more

Global Complexity Bound of a Proximal ADMM for Linearly-Constrained Nonseperable Nonconvex Composite Programming

This paper proposes and analyzes a dampened proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (DP.ADMM) for solving linearly-constrained nonconvex optimization problems where the smooth part of the objective function is nonseparable. Each iteration of DP.ADMM consists of: (ii) a sequence of partial proximal augmented Lagrangian (AL) updates, (ii) an under-relaxed Lagrange multiplier update, and (iii) a … Read more

A Preconditioned Iterative Interior Point Approach to the Conic Bundle Subproblem

The conic bundle implementation of the spectral bundle method for large scale semidefinite programming solves in each iteration a semidefinite quadratic subproblem by an interior point approach. For larger cutting model sizes the limiting operation is collecting and factorizing a Schur complement of the primal-dual KKT system. We explore possibilities to improve on this by … Read more

Completely Positive Factorization by a Riemannian Smoothing Method

Copositive optimization is a special case of convex conic programming, and it optimizes a linear function over the cone of all completely positive matrices under linear constraints. Copositive optimization provides powerful relaxations of NP-hard quadratic problems or combinatorial problems, but there are still many open problems regarding copositive or completely positive matrices. In this paper, … Read more

New Bregman proximal type algorithms for solving DC optimization problems

Difference of Convex (DC) optimization problems have objective functions that are differences between two convex functions. Representative ways of solving these problems are the proximal DC algorithms, which require that the convex part of the objective function have L-smoothness. In this article, we propose the Bregman Proximal DC Algorithm (BPDCA) for solving large-scale DC optimization … Read more

A Proximal Quasi-Newton Trust-Region Method for Nonsmooth Regularized Optimization

We develop a trust-region method for minimizing the sum of a smooth term f and a nonsmooth term h, both of which can be nonconvex. Each iteration of our method minimizes apossibly nonconvex model of f+h in a trust region. The model coincides with f+h in value and subdifferential at the center. We establish global … Read more

An inexact restoration-nonsmooth algorithm with variable accuracy for stochastic nonsmooth convex optimization problems in machine learning and stochastic linear complementarity problems

We study unconstrained optimization problems with nonsmooth and convex objective function in the form of a mathematical expectation. The proposed method approximates the expected objective function with a sample average function using Inexact Restoration-based adapted sample sizes. The sample size is chosen in an adaptive manner based on Inexact Restoration. The algorithm uses line search … Read more

A Penalty-free Infeasible Approach for a Class of Nonsmooth Optimization Problems over the Stiefel Manifold

Transforming into an exact penalty function model with convex compact constraints yields efficient infeasible approaches for optimization problems with orthogonality constraints. For smooth and L21-norm regularized cases, these infeasible approaches adopt simple and orthonormalization-free updating schemes and show high efficiency in some numerical experiments. However, to avoid orthonormalization while enforcing the feasibility of the final … Read more

On Solving Elliptic Obstacle Problems by Compact Abs-Linearization

We consider optimal control problems governed by an elliptic variational inequality of the first kind, namely the obstacle problem. The variational inequality is treated by penalization which leads to optimization problems governed by a nonsmooth semi- linear elliptic PDE. The CALi algorithm is then applied for the efficient solution of these nonsmooth optimization problems. The … Read more