A Finite-Difference Trust-Region Method for Convexly Constrained Smooth Optimization

We propose a derivative-free trust-region method based on finite-difference gradient approximations for smooth optimization problems with convex constraints. The proposed method does not require computing an approximate stationarity measure. For nonconvex problems, we establish a worst-case complexity bound of \(\mathcal{O}\!\left(n\left(\frac{L}{\sigma}\epsilon\right)^{-2}\right)\) function evaluations for the method to reach an \(\left(\frac{L}{\sigma}\epsilon\right)\)-approximate stationary point, where \(n\) is the … Read more

On the Acceleration of Proximal Bundle Methods

The proximal bundle method (PBM) is a fundamental and computationally effective algorithm for solving nonsmooth optimization problems. In this paper, we present the first variant of the PBM for smooth objectives, achieving an accelerated convergence rate of \(\frac{1}{\sqrt{\epsilon}}\log(\frac{1}{\epsilon})\), where \(\epsilon\) is the desired accuracy. Our approach addresses an open question regarding the convergence guarantee of … Read more

Searching for Optimal Per-Coordinate Step-sizes with Multidimensional Backtracking

The backtracking line-search is an effective technique to automatically tune the step-size in smooth optimization. It guarantees similar performance to using the theoretically optimal step-size. Many approaches have been developed to instead tune per-coordinate step-sizes, also known as diagonal preconditioners, but none of the existing methods are provably competitive with the optimal per-coordinate stepsizes. We … Read more

A Local MM Subspace Method for Solving Constrained Variational Problems in Image Recovery

This article introduces a new Penalized Majorization-Minimization Subspace algorithm (P-MMS) for solving smooth, constrained optimization problems. In short, our approach consists of embedding a subspace algorithm in an inexact exterior penalty procedure. The subspace strategy, combined with a Majoration-Minimization step-size search, takes great advantage of the smoothness of the penalized cost function, while the penalty … Read more

Limited-memory Common-directions Method for Large-scale Optimization: Convergence, Parallelization, and Distributed Optimization

In this paper, we present a limited-memory common-directions method for smooth optimization that interpolates between first- and second- order methods. At each iteration, a subspace of a limited dimension size is constructed using first-order information from previous iterations, and an ef- ficient Newton method is deployed to find an approximate minimizer within this subspace. With … Read more

OSGA: A fast subgradient algorithm with optimal complexity

This paper presents an algorithm for approximately minimizing a convex function in simple, not necessarily bounded convex domains, assuming only that function values and subgradients are available. No global information about the objective function is needed apart from a strong convexity parameter (which can be put to zero if only convexity is known). The worst … Read more