Convergence Rates of Inexact Proximal-Gradient Methods for Convex Optimization

We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity operator with respect to the non-smooth term. We show that both the basic proximal-gradient method and the accelerated proximal-gradient method achieve the same convergence rate as in the error-free case, provided that the errors decrease at appropriate rates.Using these rates, we perform as well as or better than a carefully chosen fixed error level on a set of structured sparsity problems.Comment: Neural Information Processing Systems (2011

Gradient methods for problems with inexact model of the objective

We consider optimization methods for convex minimization problems under inexact information on the objective function. We introduce inexact model of the objective, which as a particular cases includes inexact oracle [19] and relative smoothness condition [43]. We analyze gradient method which uses this inexact model and obtain convergence rates for convex and strongly convex problems. To show potential applications of our general framework we consider three particular problems. The first one is clustering by electorial model introduced in [49]. The second one is approximating optimal transport distance, for which we propose a Proximal Sinkhorn algorithm. The third one is devoted to approximating optimal transport barycenter and we propose a Proximal Iterative Bregman Projections algorithm. We also illustrate the practical performance of our algorithms by numerical experiments

Gradient methods for problems with inexact model of the objective

We consider optimization methods for convex minimization problems under inexact information on the objective function. We introduce inexact model of the objective, which as a particular cases includes inexact oracle [19] and relative smoothness condition [43]. We analyze gradient method which uses this inexact model and obtain convergence rates for convex and strongly convex problems. To show potential applications of our general framework we consider three particular problems. The first one is clustering by electorial model introduced in [49]. The second one is approximating optimal transport distance, for which we propose a Proximal Sinkhorn algorithm. The third one is devoted to approximating optimal transport barycenter and we propose a Proximal Iterative Bregman Projections algorithm. We also illustrate the practical performance of our algorithms by numerical experiments

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

Practical Inexact Proximal Quasi-Newton Method with Global Complexity Analysis

Recently several methods were proposed for sparse optimization which make careful use of second-order information [10, 28, 16, 3] to improve local convergence rates. These methods construct a composite quadratic approximation using Hessian information, optimize this approximation using a first-order method, such as coordinate descent and employ a line search to ensure sufficient descent. Here we propose a general framework, which includes slightly modified versions of existing algorithms and also a new algorithm, which uses limited memory BFGS Hessian approximations, and provide a novel global convergence rate analysis, which covers methods that solve subproblems via coordinate descent