On the convergence rate of the scaled proximal decomposition on the graph of a maximal monotone operator (SPDG) algorithm

Relying on fixed point techniques, Mahey, Oualibouch and Tao introduced the scaled proximal decomposition on the graph of a maximal monotone operator (SPDG) algorithm and analyzed its performance on inclusions for strongly monotone and Lipschitz continuous operators. The SPDG algorithm generalizes the Spingarn's partial inverse method by allowing scaling factors, a key strategy to speed up the convergence of numerical algorithms. In this note, we show that the SPDG algorithm can alternatively be analyzed by means of the original Spingarn's partial inverse framework, tracing back to the 1983 Spingarn's paper. We simply show that under the assumptions considered by Mahey, Oualibouch and Tao, the Spingarn's partial inverse of the underlying maximal monotone operator is strongly monotone, which allows one to employ recent results on the convergence and iteration-complexity of proximal point type methods for strongly monotone operators. By doing this, we additionally obtain a potentially faster convergence for the SPDG algorithm and a more accurate upper bound on the number of iterations needed to achieve prescribed tolerances, specially on ill-conditioned problems

An efficient adaptive accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving linearly constrained nonconvex composite problems

This paper proposes an efficient adaptive variant of a quadratic penalty accelerated inexact proximal point (QP-AIPP) method proposed earlier by the authors. Both the QP-AIPP method and its variant solve linearly set constrained nonconvex composite optimization problems using a quadratic penalty approach where the generated penalized subproblems are solved by a variant of the underlying AIPP method. The variant, in turn, solves a given penalized subproblem by generating a sequence of proximal subproblems which are then solved by an accelerated composite gradient algorithm. The main difference between AIPP and its variant is that the proximal subproblems in the former are always convex while the ones in the latter are not necessarily convex due to the fact that their prox parameters are chosen as aggressively as possible so as to improve efficiency. The possibly nonconvex proximal subproblems generated by the AIPP variant are also tentatively solved by a novel adaptive accelerated composite gradient algorithm based on the validity of some key convergence inequalities. As a result, the variant generates a sequence of proximal subproblems where the stepsizes are adaptively changed according to the responses obtained from the calls to the accelerated composite gradient algorithm. Finally, numerical results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed AIPP and QP-AIPP variants

A FISTA-type accelerated gradient algorithm for solving smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems

In this paper, we describe and establish iteration-complexity of two accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variants to solve a smooth nonconvex composite optimization problem whose objective function is the sum of a nonconvex differentiable function $f$ with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and a simple nonsmooth closed convex function $h$. When $f$ is convex, the first ACG variant reduces to the well-known FISTA for a specific choice of the input, and hence the first one can be viewed as a natural extension of the latter one to the nonconvex setting. The first variant requires an input pair $(M,m)$ such that $f$ is $m$-weakly convex, $\nabla f$ is $M$-Lipschitz continuous, and $m \le M$ (possibly $m<M$), which is usually hard to obtain or poorly estimated. The second variant on the other hand can start from an arbitrary input pair $(M,m)$ of positive scalars and its complexity is shown to be not worse, and better in some cases, than that of the first variant for a large range of the input pairs. Finally, numerical results are provided to illustrate the efficiency of the two ACG variants.Comment: 28 page

Accelerated first-order primal-dual proximal methods for linearly constrained composite convex programming

Motivated by big data applications, first-order methods have been extremely popular in recent years. However, naive gradient methods generally converge slowly. Hence, much efforts have been made to accelerate various first-order methods. This paper proposes two accelerated methods towards solving structured linearly constrained convex programming, for which we assume composite convex objective. The first method is the accelerated linearized augmented Lagrangian method (LALM). At each update to the primal variable, it allows linearization to the differentiable function and also the augmented term, and thus it enables easy subproblems. Assuming merely weak convexity, we show that LALM owns $O(1/t)$ convergence if parameters are kept fixed during all the iterations and can be accelerated to $O(1/t^2)$ if the parameters are adapted, where $t$ is the number of total iterations. The second method is the accelerated linearized alternating direction method of multipliers (LADMM). In addition to the composite convexity, it further assumes two-block structure on the objective. Different from classic ADMM, our method allows linearization to the objective and also augmented term to make the update simple. Assuming strong convexity on one block variable, we show that LADMM also enjoys $O(1/t^2)$ convergence with adaptive parameters. This result is a significant improvement over that in [Goldstein et. al, SIIMS'14], which requires strong convexity on both block variables and no linearization to the objective or augmented term. Numerical experiments are performed on quadratic programming, image denoising, and support vector machine. The proposed accelerated methods are compared to nonaccelerated ones and also existing accelerated methods. The results demonstrate the validness of acceleration and superior performance of the proposed methods over existing ones

On inexact relative-error hybrid proximal extragradient, forward-backward and Tseng's modified forward-backward methods with inertial effects

In this paper, we propose and study the asymptotic convergence and nonasymptotic global convergence rates (iteration-complexity) of an inertial under-relaxed version of the relative-error hybrid proximal extragradient (HPE) method for solving monotone inclusion problems. We analyze the proposed method under more flexible assumptions than existing ones on the extrapolation and relative-error parameters. As applications, we propose and/or study inertial under-relaxed forward-backward and Tseng's modified forward-backward type methods for solving structured monotone inclusions

Iteration complexity of an inexact Douglas-Rachford method and of a Douglas-Rachford-Tseng's F-B four-operator splitting method for solving monotone inclusions

In this paper, we propose and study the iteration complexity of an inexact Douglas-Rachford splitting (DRS) method and a Douglas-Rachford-Tseng's forward-backward (F-B) splitting method for solving two-operator and four-operator monotone inclusions, respectively. The former method (although based on a slightly different mechanism of iteration) is motivated by the recent work of J. Eckstein and W. Yao, in which an inexact DRS method is derived from a special instance of the hybrid proximal extragradient (HPE) method of Solodov and Svaiter, while the latter one combines the proposed inexact DRS method (used as an outer iteration) with a Tseng's F-B splitting type method (used as an inner iteration) for solving the corresponding subproblems. We prove iteration complexity bounds for both algorithms in the pointwise (non-ergodic) as well as in the ergodic sense by showing that they admit two different iterations: one that can be embedded into the HPE method, for which the iteration complexity is known since the work of Monteiro and Svaiter, and another one which demands a separate analysis. Finally, we perform simple numerical experiments %on three-operator and four-operator monotone inclusions to show the performance of the proposed methods when compared with other existing algorithms

Fast Saddle-Point Algorithm for Generalized Dantzig Selector and FDR Control with the Ordered l1-Norm

In this paper we propose a primal-dual proximal extragradient algorithm to solve the generalized Dantzig selector (GDS) estimation problem, based on a new convex-concave saddle-point (SP) reformulation. Our new formulation makes it possible to adopt recent developments in saddle-point optimization, to achieve the optimal $O(1/k)$ rate of convergence. Compared to the optimal non-SP algorithms, ours do not require specification of sensitive parameters that affect algorithm performance or solution quality. We also provide a new analysis showing a possibility of local acceleration to achieve the rate of $O(1/k^2)$ in special cases even without strong convexity or strong smoothness. As an application, we propose a GDS equipped with the ordered $\ell_1$-norm, showing its false discovery rate control properties in variable selection. Algorithm performance is compared between ours and other alternatives, including the linearized ADMM, Nesterov's smoothing, Nemirovski's mirror-prox, and the accelerated hybrid proximal extragradient techniques.Comment: In AISTATS 201

DIPPA: An improved Method for Bilinear Saddle Point Problems

This paper studies bilinear saddle point problems $\min_{\bf{x}} \max_{\bf{y}} g(\bf{x}) + \bf{x}^{\top} \bf{A} \bf{y} - h(\bf{y})$, where the functions $g, h$ are smooth and strongly-convex. When the gradient and proximal oracle related to $g$ and $h$ are accessible, optimal algorithms have already been developed in the literature \cite{chambolle2011first, palaniappan2016stochastic}. However, the proximal operator is not always easy to compute, especially in constraint zero-sum matrix games \cite{zhang2020sparsified}. This work proposes a new algorithm which only requires the access to the gradients of $g, h$. Our algorithm achieves a complexity upper bound $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( \frac{\|\bf{A}\|_2}{\sqrt{\mu_x \mu_y}} + \sqrt[4]{\kappa_x \kappa_y (\kappa_x + \kappa_y)} \right)$ which has optimal dependency on the coupling condition number $\frac{\|\bf{A}\|_2}{\sqrt{\mu_x \mu_y}}$ up to logarithmic factors

A Stochastic Variance-reduced Accelerated Primal-dual Method for Finite-sum Saddle-point Problems

In this paper, we propose a variance-reduced primal-dual algorithm with Bregman distance for solving convex-concave saddle-point problems with finite-sum structure and nonbilinear coupling function. This type of problems typically arises in machine learning and game theory. Based on some standard assumptions, the algorithm is proved to converge with oracle complexity of $O\left(\frac{\sqrt n}{\epsilon}\right)$ and $O\left(\frac{n}{\sqrt \epsilon}+\frac{1}{\epsilon^{1.5}}\right)$ using constant and non-constant parameters, respectively where $n$ is the number of function components. Compared with existing methods, our framework yields a significant improvement over the number of required primal-dual gradient samples to achieve $\epsilon$-accuracy of the primal-dual gap. We tested our method for solving a distributionally robust optimization problem to show the effectiveness of the algorithm

An accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving nonconvex-concave min-max problems

This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite smooth approximations of the original problems. More specifically, in the unconstrained (resp. constrained) case, approximate stationary points of the original problem are obtained by applying, to its composite smooth approximation, an accelerated inexact proximal point (resp. quadratic penalty) method presented in a previous paper by the authors. Iteration complexity bounds for both smoothing schemes are also established. Finally, numerical results are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the unconstrained smoothing scheme