Convergence Rates with Inexact Non-expansive Operators

In this paper, we present a convergence rate analysis for the inexact Krasnosel'skii-Mann iteration built from nonexpansive operators. Our results include two main parts: we first establish global pointwise and ergodic iteration-complexity bounds, and then, under a metric subregularity assumption, we establish local linear convergence for the distance of the iterates to the set of fixed points. The obtained iteration-complexity result can be applied to analyze the convergence rate of various monotone operator splitting methods in the literature, including the Forward-Backward, the Generalized Forward-Backward, Douglas-Rachford, alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and Primal-Dual splitting methods. For these methods, we also develop easily verifiable termination criteria for finding an approximate solution, which can be seen as a generalization of the termination criterion for the classical gradient descent method. We finally develop a parallel analysis for the non-stationary Krasnosel'skii-Mann iteration. The usefulness of our results is illustrated by applying them to a large class of structured monotone inclusion and convex optimization problems. Experiments on some large scale inverse problems in signal and image processing problems are shown.Comment: This is an extended version of the work presented in http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.6636, and is accepted by the Mathematical Programmin

On the Global Linear Convergence of the ADMM with Multi-Block Variables

The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) has been widely used for solving structured convex optimization problems. In particular, the ADMM can solve convex programs that minimize the sum of $N$ convex functions with $N$-block variables linked by some linear constraints. While the convergence of the ADMM for $N=2$ was well established in the literature, it remained an open problem for a long time whether or not the ADMM for $N \ge 3$ is still convergent. Recently, it was shown in [3] that without further conditions the ADMM for $N\ge 3$ may actually fail to converge. In this paper, we show that under some easily verifiable and reasonable conditions the global linear convergence of the ADMM when $N\geq 3$ can still be assured, which is important since the ADMM is a popular method for solving large scale multi-block optimization models and is known to perform very well in practice even when $N\ge 3$. Our study aims to offer an explanation for this phenomenon