Fixed-Point Automatic Differentiation of Forward–Backward Splitting Algorithms for Partly Smooth Functions

A large class of non-smooth practical optimization problems can be written as minimization of a sum of smooth and partly smooth functions. We consider such structured problems which also depend on a parameter vector and study the problem of differentiating its solution mapping with respect to the parameter which has far reaching applications in sensitivity … Read more

Disk matrices and the proximal mapping for the numerical radius

Optimal matrices for problems involving the matrix numerical radius often have fields of values that are disks, a phenomenon associated with partial smoothness. Such matrices are highly structured: we experiment in particular with the proximal mapping for the radius, which often maps n-by-n random matrix inputs into a particular manifold of disk matrices that has … 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

Active-set Newton methods and partial smoothness

Diverse optimization algorithms correctly identify, in finite time, intrinsic constraints that must be active at optimality. Analogous behavior extends beyond optimization to systems involving partly smooth operators, and in particular to variational inequalities over partly smooth sets. As in classical nonlinear programming, such active-set structure underlies the design of accelerated local algorithms of Newton type. … Read more

Partial smoothness of the numerical radius at matrices whose fields of values are disks

Solutions to optimization problems involving the numerical radius often belong to a special class: the set of matrices having field of values a disk centered at the origin. After illustrating this phenomenon with some examples, we illuminate it by studying matrices around which this set of “disk matrices” is a manifold with respect to which … Read more

Local Convergence Properties of Douglas–Rachford and ADMM

The Douglas–Rachford (DR) and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) are two proximal splitting algorithms designed to minimize the sum of two proper lower semi-continuous convex functions whose proximity operators are easy to compute. The goal of this work is to understand the local linear convergence behaviour of DR/ADMM when the involved functions are moreover … Read more

A Multi-step Inertial Forward–Backward Splitting Method for Non-convex Optimization

In this paper, we propose a multi-step inertial Forward–Backward splitting algorithm for minimizing the sum of two non-necessarily convex functions, one of which is proper lower semi-continuous while the other is differentiable with a Lipschitz continuous gradient. We first prove global convergence of the scheme with the help of the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz property. Then, when the … Read more

Activity Identification and Local Linear Convergence of Forward–Backward-type methods

In this paper, we consider a class of Forward–Backward (FB) splitting methods that includes several variants (e.g. inertial schemes, FISTA) for minimizing the sum of two proper convex and lower semi-continuous functions, one of which has a Lipschitz continuous gradient, and the other is partly smooth relatively to a smooth active manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We propose … Read more

Activity Identification and Local Linear Convergence of Douglas-Rachford/ADMM under Partial Smoothness

Proximal splitting algorithms are becoming popular to solve convex optimization problems in variational image processing. Within this class, Douglas-Rachford (DR) and ADMM are designed to minimize the sum of two proper lower semicontinuous convex functions whose proximity operators are easy to compute. The goal of this work is to understand the local convergence behaviour of … Read more

Local Linear Convergence of Forward–Backward under Partial Smoothness

In this paper, we consider the Forward–Backward proximal splitting algorithm to minimize the sum of two proper closed convex functions, one of which having a Lipschitz–continuous gradient and the other being partly smooth relatively to an active manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We propose a unified framework in which we show that the Forward–Backward (i) correctly identifies the … Read more