1,103 research outputs found
The continuous Newton-Raphson method can look ahead
This paper is about an intriguing property of the continuous Newton-Raphson method for the minimization of a continuous objective function f: if x is a point in the domain of attraction of a strict local minimizer x* then the flux line of the Newton-Raphson flow that starts in x approaches x* from a direction that depends only on the behavior of f in arbitrarily small neighborhoods around x and x*. In fact, if F is a sufficiently benign perturbation of f on an open region D not containing x, then the two flux lines through x defined by the Newton-Raphson vector fields that correspond to f and F differ from one another only within D.\ud
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The work was supported by EPSRC grant GR/S34472 (R. Hauser) and by the Clarendon Fund, Oxford University Press and ORS Award, Universities UK (J Nedic
Distributed optimization over time-varying directed graphs
We consider distributed optimization by a collection of nodes, each having
access to its own convex function, whose collective goal is to minimize the sum
of the functions. The communications between nodes are described by a
time-varying sequence of directed graphs, which is uniformly strongly
connected. For such communications, assuming that every node knows its
out-degree, we develop a broadcast-based algorithm, termed the
subgradient-push, which steers every node to an optimal value under a standard
assumption of subgradient boundedness. The subgradient-push requires no
knowledge of either the number of agents or the graph sequence to implement.
Our analysis shows that the subgradient-push algorithm converges at a rate of
, where the constant depends on the initial values at the
nodes, the subgradient norms, and, more interestingly, on both the consensus
speed and the imbalances of influence among the nodes
Cloud-Based Centralized/Decentralized Multi-Agent Optimization with Communication Delays
We present and analyze a computational hybrid architecture for performing
multi-agent optimization. The optimization problems under consideration have
convex objective and constraint functions with mild smoothness conditions
imposed on them. For such problems, we provide a primal-dual algorithm
implemented in the hybrid architecture, which consists of a decentralized
network of agents into which centralized information is occasionally injected,
and we establish its convergence properties. To accomplish this, a central
cloud computer aggregates global information, carries out computations of the
dual variables based on this information, and then distributes the updated dual
variables to the agents. The agents update their (primal) state variables and
also communicate among themselves with each agent sharing and receiving state
information with some number of its neighbors. Throughout, communications with
the cloud are not assumed to be synchronous or instantaneous, and communication
delays are explicitly accounted for in the modeling and analysis of the system.
Experimental results are presented to support the theoretical developments
made.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure
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