## Stochastic Approximations and Perturbations in Forward-Backward Splitting for Monotone Operators

We investigate the asymptotic behavior of a stochastic version of the forward-backward splitting algorithm for finding a zero of the sum of a maximally monotone set-valued operator and a cocoercive operator in Hilbert spaces. Our general setting features stochastic approximations of the cocoercive operator and stochastic perturbations in the evaluation of the resolvents of the … Read more

## First-Order Algorithms for Convex Optimization with Nonseparate Objective and Coupled Constraints

In this paper we consider a block-structured convex optimization model, where in the objective the block-variables are nonseparable and they are further linearly coupled in the constraint. For the 2-block case, we propose a number of first-order algorithms to solve this model. First, the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is extended, assuming that it … Read more

## A proximal gradient method for ensemble density functional theory

The ensemble density functional theory is valuable for simulations of metallic systems due to the absence of a gap in the spectrum of the Hamiltonian matrices. Although the widely used self-consistent field iteration method can be extended to solve the minimization of the total energy functional with respect to orthogonality constraints, there is no theoretical … Read more

## A Proximal Stochastic Gradient Method with Progressive Variance Reduction

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is the average of a large number of smooth component functions, and the other is a general convex function that admits a simple proximal mapping. We assume the whole objective function is strongly convex. Such problems often arise in machine learning, known … Read more

## Alternating Proximal Gradient Method for Convex Minimization

In this paper, we propose an alternating proximal gradient method that solves convex minimization problems with three or more separable blocks in the objective function. Our method is based on the framework of alternating direction method of multipliers. The main computational effort in each iteration of the proposed method is to compute the proximal mappings … Read more

## A Block Coordinate Descent Method for Regularized Multi-Convex Optimization with Applications to Nonnegative Tensor Factorization and Completion

This paper considers regularized block multi-convex optimization, where the feasible set and objective function are generally non-convex but convex in each block of variables. We review some of its interesting examples and propose a generalized block coordinate descent method. (Using proximal updates, we further allow non-convexity over some blocks.) Under certain conditions, we show that … Read more

## A Proximal-Gradient Homotopy Method for the Sparse Least-Squares Problem

We consider solving the $\ell_1$-regularized least-squares ($\ell_1$-LS) problem in the context of sparse recovery, for applications such as compressed sensing. The standard proximal gradient method, also known as iterative soft-thresholding when applied to this problem, has low computational cost per iteration but a rather slow convergence rate. Nevertheless, when the solution is sparse, it often … Read more

## Trace Norm Regularization: Reformulations, Algorithms, and Multi-task Learning

We consider a recently proposed optimization formulation of multi-task learning based on trace norm regularized least squares. While this problem may be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), its size is beyond general SDP solvers. Previous solution approaches apply proximal gradient methods to solve the primal problem. We derive new primal and dual reformulations of … Read more