Variance Reduced Halpern Iteration for Finite-Sum Monotone Inclusions

Machine learning approaches relying on such criteria as adversarial robustness or multi-agent settings have raised the need for solving game-theoretic equilibrium problems. Of particular relevance to these applications are methods targeting finite-sum structure, which generically arises in empirical variants of learning problems in these contexts. Further, methods with computable approximation errors are highly desirable, as they provide verifiable exit criteria. Motivated by these applications, we study finite-sum monotone inclusion problems, which model broad classes of equilibrium problems. Our main contributions are variants of the classical Halpern iteration that employ variance reduction to obtain improved complexity guarantees in which $n$ component operators in the finite sum are ``on average'' either cocoercive or Lipschitz continuous and monotone, with parameter $L$. The resulting oracle complexity of our methods, which provide guarantees for the last iterate and for a (computable) operator norm residual, is $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}( n + \sqrt{n}L\varepsilon^{-1})$, which improves upon existing methods by a factor up to $\sqrt{n}$. This constitutes the first variance reduction-type result for general finite-sum monotone inclusions and for more specific problems such as convex-concave optimization when operator norm residual is the optimality measure. We further argue that, up to poly-logarithmic factors, this complexity is unimprovable in the monotone Lipschitz setting; i.e., the provided result is near-optimal

Semi-Anchored Multi-Step Gradient Descent Ascent Method for Structured Nonconvex-Nonconcave Composite Minimax Problems

Minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network, adversarial training, and fair training, are widely solved by a multi-step gradient descent ascent (MGDA) method in practice. However, its convergence guarantee is limited. In this paper, inspired by the primal-dual hybrid gradient method, we propose a new semi-anchoring (SA) technique for the MGDA method. This makes the MGDA method find a stationary point of a structured nonconvex-nonconcave composite minimax problem; its saddle-subdifferential operator satisfies the weak Minty variational inequality condition. The resulting method, named SA-MGDA, is built upon a Bregman proximal point method. We further develop its backtracking line-search version, and its non-Euclidean version for smooth adaptable functions. Numerical experiments, including a fair classification training, are provided

A general inexact iterative method for monotone operators, equilibrium problems and fıxed point problems of semigroups in Hilbert spaces

Let H be a real Hilbert space. Consider on H a nonexpansive family T = {T(t) :0 ≤ t < ∞} with a common fixed point, a contraction f with the coefficient

Principled Analyses and Design of First-Order Methods with Inexact Proximal Operators

Proximal operations are among the most common primitives appearing in both practical and theoretical (or high-level) optimization methods. This basic operation typically consists in solving an intermediary (hopefully simpler) optimization problem. In this work, we survey notions of inaccuracies that can be used when solving those intermediary optimization problems. Then, we show that worst-case guarantees for algorithms relying on such inexact proximal operations can be systematically obtained through a generic procedure based on semidefinite programming. This methodology is primarily based on the approach introduced by Drori and Teboulle (Mathematical Programming, 2014) and on convex interpolation results, and allows producing non-improvable worst-case analyzes. In other words, for a given algorithm, the methodology generates both worst-case certificates (i.e., proofs) and problem instances on which those bounds are achieved. Relying on this methodology, we provide three new methods with conceptually simple proofs: (i) an optimized relatively inexact proximal point method, (ii) an extension of the hybrid proximal extragradient method of Monteiro and Svaiter (SIAM Journal on Optimization, 2013), and (iii) an inexact accelerated forward-backward splitting supporting backtracking line-search, and both (ii) and (iii) supporting possibly strongly convex objectives. Finally, we use the methodology for studying a recent inexact variant of the Douglas-Rachford splitting due to Eckstein and Yao (Mathematical Programming, 2018). We showcase and compare the different variants of the accelerated inexact forward-backward method on a factorization and a total variation problem.Comment: Minor modifications including acknowledgments and references. Code available at https://github.com/mathbarre/InexactProximalOperator

An abstract proximal point algorithm

The proximal point algorithm is a widely used tool for solving a variety of convex optimization problems such as finding zeros of maximally monotone operators, fixed points of nonexpansive mappings, as well as minimizing convex functions. The algorithm works by applying successively so-called "resolvent" mappings associated to the original object that one aims to optimize. In this paper we abstract from the corresponding resolvents employed in these problems the natural notion of jointly firmly nonexpansive families of mappings. This leads to a streamlined method of proving weak convergence of this class of algorithms in the context of complete CAT(0) spaces (and hence also in Hilbert spaces). In addition, we consider the notion of uniform firm nonexpansivity in order to similarly provide a unified presentation of a case where the algorithm converges strongly. Methods which stem from proof mining, an applied subfield of logic, yield in this situation computable and low-complexity rates of convergence

Accelerated Infeasibility Detection of Constrained Optimization and Fixed-Point Iterations

As first-order optimization methods become the method of choice for solving large-scale optimization problems, optimization solvers based on first-order algorithms are being built. Such general-purpose solvers must robustly detect infeasible or misspecified problem instances, but the computational complexity of first-order methods for doing so has yet to be formally studied. In this work, we characterize the optimal accelerated rate of infeasibility detection. We show that the standard fixed-point iteration achieves a $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ and $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ rates, respectively, on the normalized iterates and the fixed-point residual converging to the infimal displacement vector, while the accelerated fixed-point iteration achieves $\mathcal{O}(1/k^2)$ and $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/k^2)$ rates. We then provide a matching complexity lower bound to establish that $\Theta(1/k^2)$ is indeed the optimal accelerated rate