Singular vanishing-viscosity limits of gradient flows: the finite-dimensional case

In this note we study the singular vanishing-viscosity limit of a gradient flow set in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space and driven by a smooth, but possibly non convex, time-dependent energy functional. We resort to ideas and techniques from the variational approach to gradient flows and rate-independent evolution to show that, under suitable assumptions, the solutions to the singularly perturbed problem converge to a curve of stationary points of the energy, whose behavior at jump points is characterized in terms of the notion of Dissipative Viscosity solution. We also provide sufficient conditions under which Dissipative Viscosity solutions enjoy better properties, which turn them into Balanced Viscosity solutions. Finally, we discuss the generic character of our assumptions.Comment: 27 page

Discrete Approximations of a Controlled Sweeping Process

The paper is devoted to the study of a new class of optimal control problems governed by the classical Moreau sweeping process with the new feature that the polyhe- dral moving set is not fixed while controlled by time-dependent functions. The dynamics of such problems is described by dissipative non-Lipschitzian differential inclusions with state constraints of equality and inequality types. It makes challenging and difficult their anal- ysis and optimization. In this paper we establish some existence results for the sweeping process under consideration and develop the method of discrete approximations that allows us to strongly approximate, in the W^{1,2} topology, optimal solutions of the continuous-type sweeping process by their discrete counterparts

Dynamic Processes, Fixed Points, Endpoints, Asymmetric Structures, and Investigations Related to Caristi, Nadler, and Banach in Uniform Spaces

Research ArticleIn uniform spaces (...) with symmetric structures determined by the D-families of pseudometrics which define uniformity in these spaces, the new symmetric and asymmetric structures determined by the J-families of generalized pseudodistances on (...) are constructed; using these structures the set-valued contractions of two kinds of Nadler type are defined and the new and general theorems concerning the existence of fixed points and endpoints for such contractions are proved. Moreover, using these new structures, the single-valued contractions of two kinds of Banach type are defined and the new and general versions of the Banach uniqueness and iterate approximation of fixed point theorem for uniform spaces are established. Contractions defined and studied here are not necessarily continuous. One of the main key ideas in this paper is the application of our fixed point and endpoint version of Caristi type theorem for dissipative set-valued dynamic systems without lower semicontinuous entropies in uniform spaces with structures determined by J-families. Results are new also in locally convex and metric spaces. Examples are provided

On the Global Convergence of Continuous-Time Stochastic Heavy-Ball Method for Nonconvex Optimization

We study the convergence behavior of the stochastic heavy-ball method with a small stepsize. Under a change of time scale, we approximate the discrete method by a stochastic differential equation that models small random perturbations of a coupled system of nonlinear oscillators. We rigorously show that the perturbed system converges to a local minimum in a logarithmic time. This indicates that for the diffusion process that approximates the stochastic heavy-ball method, it takes (up to a logarithmic factor) only a linear time of the square root of the inverse stepsize to escape from all saddle points. This results may suggest a fast convergence of its discrete-time counterpart. Our theoretical results are validated by numerical experiments.Comment: accepted at IEEE International Conference on Big Data in 201