33,868 research outputs found
MAGMA: Multi-level accelerated gradient mirror descent algorithm for large-scale convex composite minimization
Composite convex optimization models arise in several applications, and are
especially prevalent in inverse problems with a sparsity inducing norm and in
general convex optimization with simple constraints. The most widely used
algorithms for convex composite models are accelerated first order methods,
however they can take a large number of iterations to compute an acceptable
solution for large-scale problems. In this paper we propose to speed up first
order methods by taking advantage of the structure present in many applications
and in image processing in particular. Our method is based on multi-level
optimization methods and exploits the fact that many applications that give
rise to large scale models can be modelled using varying degrees of fidelity.
We use Nesterov's acceleration techniques together with the multi-level
approach to achieve convergence rate, where
denotes the desired accuracy. The proposed method has a better
convergence rate than any other existing multi-level method for convex
problems, and in addition has the same rate as accelerated methods, which is
known to be optimal for first-order methods. Moreover, as our numerical
experiments show, on large-scale face recognition problems our algorithm is
several times faster than the state of the art
Templates for Convex Cone Problems with Applications to Sparse Signal Recovery
This paper develops a general framework for solving a variety of convex cone
problems that frequently arise in signal processing, machine learning,
statistics, and other fields. The approach works as follows: first, determine a
conic formulation of the problem; second, determine its dual; third, apply
smoothing; and fourth, solve using an optimal first-order method. A merit of
this approach is its flexibility: for example, all compressed sensing problems
can be solved via this approach. These include models with objective
functionals such as the total-variation norm, ||Wx||_1 where W is arbitrary, or
a combination thereof. In addition, the paper also introduces a number of
technical contributions such as a novel continuation scheme, a novel approach
for controlling the step size, and some new results showing that the smooth and
unsmoothed problems are sometimes formally equivalent. Combined with our
framework, these lead to novel, stable and computationally efficient
algorithms. For instance, our general implementation is competitive with
state-of-the-art methods for solving intensively studied problems such as the
LASSO. Further, numerical experiments show that one can solve the Dantzig
selector problem, for which no efficient large-scale solvers exist, in a few
hundred iterations. Finally, the paper is accompanied with a software release.
This software is not a single, monolithic solver; rather, it is a suite of
programs and routines designed to serve as building blocks for constructing
complete algorithms.Comment: The TFOCS software is available at http://tfocs.stanford.edu This
version has updated reference
An Accelerated Proximal Coordinate Gradient Method and its Application to Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of two convex functions: one is
smooth and given by a gradient oracle, and the other is separable over blocks
of coordinates and has a simple known structure over each block. We develop an
accelerated randomized proximal coordinate gradient (APCG) method for
minimizing such convex composite functions. For strongly convex functions, our
method achieves faster linear convergence rates than existing randomized
proximal coordinate gradient methods. Without strong convexity, our method
enjoys accelerated sublinear convergence rates. We show how to apply the APCG
method to solve the regularized empirical risk minimization (ERM) problem, and
devise efficient implementations that avoid full-dimensional vector operations.
For ill-conditioned ERM problems, our method obtains improved convergence rates
than the state-of-the-art stochastic dual coordinate ascent (SDCA) method
Catalyst Acceleration for First-order Convex Optimization: from Theory to Practice
We introduce a generic scheme for accelerating gradient-based optimization
methods in the sense of Nesterov. The approach, called Catalyst, builds upon
the inexact accelerated proximal point algorithm for minimizing a convex
objective function, and consists of approximately solving a sequence of
well-chosen auxiliary problems, leading to faster convergence. One of the keys
to achieve acceleration in theory and in practice is to solve these
sub-problems with appropriate accuracy by using the right stopping criterion
and the right warm-start strategy. We give practical guidelines to use Catalyst
and present a comprehensive analysis of its global complexity. We show that
Catalyst applies to a large class of algorithms, including gradient descent,
block coordinate descent, incremental algorithms such as SAG, SAGA, SDCA, SVRG,
MISO/Finito, and their proximal variants. For all of these methods, we
establish faster rates using the Catalyst acceleration, for strongly convex and
non-strongly convex objectives. We conclude with extensive experiments showing
that acceleration is useful in practice, especially for ill-conditioned
problems.Comment: link to publisher website:
http://jmlr.org/papers/volume18/17-748/17-748.pd
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