Accelerated Gradient Descent via Long Steps

Recently Grimmer [1] showed for smooth convex optimization by utilizing longer steps periodically, gradient descent’s state-of-the-art O(1/T) convergence guarantees can be improved by constant factors, conjecturing an accelerated rate strictly faster than O(1/T) could be possible. Here we prove such a big-O gain, establishing gradient descent’s first accelerated convergence rate in this setting. Namely, we … Read more

The exact worst-case convergence rate of the alternating direction method of multipliers

Recently, semidefinite programming performance estimation has been employed as a strong tool for the worst-case performance analysis of first order methods. In this paper, we derive new non-ergodic convergence rates for the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) by using performance estimation. We give some examples which show the exactness of the given bounds. We … Read more

Exact Worst-case Performance of First-order Methods for Composite Convex Optimization

We provide a framework for computing the exact worst-case performance of any algorithm belonging to a broad class of oracle-based first-order methods for composite convex optimization, including those performing explicit, projected, proximal, conditional and inexact (sub)gradient steps. We simultaneously obtain tight worst-case guarantees and explicit instances of optimization problems on which the algorithm reaches this … Read more