In this paper we develop a randomized block-coordinate descent method for minimizing the sum of a smooth and a simple nonsmooth block-separable convex function and prove that it obtains an $ε$-accurate solution with probability at least $1-ρ$ in at most $O(\tfrac{n}ε \log \tfrac{1}ρ)$ iterations, where $n$ is the number of blocks. For strongly convex functions the method converges linearly. This extends recent results of Nesterov [Efficiency of coordinate descent methods on huge-scale optimization problems, CORE Discussion Paper #2010/2], which cover the smooth case, to composite minimization, while at the same time improving the complexity by the factor of 4 and removing $ε$ from the logarithmic term. More importantly, in contrast with the aforementioned work in which the author achieves the results by applying the method to a regularized version of the objective function with an unknown scaling factor, we show that this is not necessary, thus achieving true iteration complexity bounds. In the smooth case we also allow for arbitrary probability vectors and non-Euclidean norms. Finally, we demonstrate numerically that the algorithm is able to solve huge-scale $\ell_1$-regularized least squares and support vector machine problems with a billion variables.
We develop randomized (block) coordinate descent (CD) methods for linearly constrained convex optimization. Unlike most CD methods, we do not assume the constraints to be separable, but let them be coupled linearly. To our knowledge, ours is the first CD method that allows linear coupling constraints, without making the global iteration complexity have an exponential dependence on the number of constraints. We present algorithms and analysis for four key problem scenarios: (i) smooth; (ii) smooth + nonsmooth separable; (iii) asynchronous parallel; and (iv) stochastic. We illustrate empirical b…
We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of an average function of a large number of smooth convex components and a general, possibly non-differentiable, convex function. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem with the assumption that the sum is strongly convex, few methods support the non-strongly convex case. Adding a small quadratic regularization is a common devise used to tackle non-strongly convex problems; however, it may cause loss of sparsity of solutions or weaken the performance of the algorithms. Avoiding this devise, we propose an accelerated randomize…
In this paper, we study randomized and cyclic coordinate descent for convex unconstrained optimization problems. We improve the known convergence rates in some cases by using the numerical semidefinite programming performance estimation method. As a spin-off we provide a method to analyse the worst-case performance of the Gauss-Seidel iterative method for linear systems where the coefficient matrix is positive semidefinite with a positive diagonal.
In the paper we consider an application of mirror descent (dual averaging) to the stochastic online convex optimization problems. We compare classical mirror descent (Nemirovski-Yudin, 1979) with dual averaging (Nesterov, 2005) and Grigoriadis-Khachiyan algorithm (1995). Grigoriadis-Khachiyan algorithm has just proved to be a randomized mirror descent (dual averaging) with randomization in KL-projection of (sub)gradient to a unit simplex. We found out that this randomization is an optimal way of solving sparse matrix games and some other problems arising in convex optimization and experts weig…
This paper is concerned with multi-agent optimization problem. A distributed randomized gradient-free mirror descent (DRGFMD) method is developed by introducing a randomized gradient-free oracle in the mirror descent scheme where the non-Euclidean Bregman divergence is used. The classical gradient descent method is generalized without using subgradient information of objective functions. The proposed algorithm is the first distributed non-Euclidean zeroth-order method which achieves an $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ convergence rate, recovering the best known optimal rate of distributed compact constrained c…
Randomized Fast Subspace Descent (RFASD) Methods are developed and analyzed for smooth and non-constraint convex optimization problems. The efficiency of the method relies on a space decomposition which is stable in $A$-norm, and meanwhile, the condition number $κ_A$ measured in $A$-norm is small. At each iteration, the subspace is chosen randomly either uniformly or by a probability proportional to the local Lipschitz constants. Then in each chosen subspace, a preconditioned gradient descent method is applied. RFASD converges sublinearly for convex functions and linearly for strongly convex f…
This paper is about randomized iterative algorithms for solving a linear system of equations $X β= y$ in different settings. Recent interest in the topic was reignited when Strohmer and Vershynin (2009) proved the linear convergence rate of a Randomized Kaczmarz (RK) algorithm that works on the rows of $X$ (data points). Following that, Leventhal and Lewis (2010) proved the linear convergence of a Randomized Coordinate Descent (RCD) algorithm that works on the columns of $X$ (features). The aim of this paper is to simplify our understanding of these two algorithms, establish the direct relatio…
An increasing number of machine learning problems, such as robust or adversarial variants of existing algorithms, require minimizing a loss function that is itself defined as a maximum. Carrying a loop of stochastic gradient ascent (SGA) steps on the (inner) maximization problem, followed by an SGD step on the (outer) minimization, is known as Epoch Stochastic Gradient \textit{Descent Ascent} (ESGDA). While successful in practice, the theoretical analysis of ESGDA remains challenging, with no clear guidance on choices for the inner loop size nor on the interplay between inner/outer step sizes.…
We analyze the coordinate descent method with a new coordinate selection strategy, called volume sampling. This strategy prescribes selecting subsets of variables of certain size proportionally to the determinants of principal submatrices of the matrix, that bounds the curvature of the objective function. In the particular case, when the size of the subsets equals one, volume sampling coincides with the well-known strategy of sampling coordinates proportionally to their Lipschitz constants. For the coordinate descent with volume sampling, we establish the convergence rates both for convex and …
Université Côte d’Azur（蔚蓝海岸大学）；Université de Rouen（鲁昂大学）；Université Aix-Marseille（艾克斯-马赛大学）；INSA de Rouen（鲁昂国立应用科学学院）
As the number of samples and dimensionality of optimization problems related to statistics an machine learning explode, block coordinate descent algorithms have gained popularity since they reduce the original problem to several smaller ones. Coordinates to be optimized are usually selected randomly according to a given probability distribution. We introduce an importance sampling strategy that helps randomized coordinate descent algorithms to focus on blocks that are still far from convergence. The framework applies to problems composed of the sum of two possibly non-convex terms, one being s…
Block-coordinate descent algorithms and alternating minimization methods are fundamental optimization algorithms and an important primitive in large-scale optimization and machine learning. While various block-coordinate-descent-type methods have been studied extensively, only alternating minimization -- which applies to the setting of only two blocks -- is known to have convergence time that scales independently of the least smooth block. A natural question is then: is the setting of two blocks special? We show that the answer is "no" as long as the least smooth block can be optimized exactly…
This note considers the problem of minimizing interacting free energy. Motivated by the mirror descent algorithm, for a given interacting free energy, we propose a descent dynamics with a novel metric that takes into consideration the reference measure and the interacting term. This metric naturally suggests a monotone reparameterization of the probability measure. By discretizing the reparameterized descent dynamics with the explicit Euler method, we arrive at a new mirror-descent-type algorithm for minimizing interacting free energy. Numerical results are included to demonstrate the efficien…
The problem of minimizing a separable convex function under linearly coupled constraints arises from various application domains such as economic systems, distributed control, and network flow. The main challenge for solving this problem is that the size of data is very large, which makes usual gradient-based methods infeasible. Recently, Necoara, Nesterov, and Glineur [Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, 173 (2017) 227-2254] proposed an efficient randomized coordinate descent method to solve this type of optimization problems and presented an appealing convergence analysis. In th…
We extend coordinate descent to manifold domains, and provide convergence analyses for geodesically convex and non-convex smooth objective functions. Our key insight is to draw an analogy between coordinate blocks in Euclidean space and tangent subspaces of a manifold. Hence, our method is called tangent subspace descent (TSD). The core principle behind ensuring convergence of TSD is the appropriate choice of subspace at each iteration. To this end, we propose two novel conditions, the gap ensuring and $C$-randomized norm conditions on deterministic and randomized modes of subspace selection r…
In this work, we analyze the global convergence property of coordinate gradient descent with random choice of coordinates and stepsizes for non-convex optimization problems. Under generic assumptions, we prove that the algorithm iterate will almost surely escape strict saddle points of the objective function. As a result, the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to local minima if all saddle points are strict. Our proof is based on viewing coordinate descent algorithm as a nonlinear random dynamical system and a quantitative finite block analysis of its linearization around saddle points.
Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
In this paper we analyze the randomized block-coordinate descent (RBCD) methods proposed in [8,11] for minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a block-separable convex function. In particular, we extend Nesterov's technique developed in [8] for analyzing the RBCD method for minimizing a smooth convex function over a block-separable closed convex set to the aforementioned more general problem and obtain a sharper expected-value type of convergence rate than the one implied in [11]. Also, we obtain a better high-probability type of iteration complexity, which improves upon the one in …
In this work we propose a distributed randomized block coordinate descent method for minimizing a convex function with a huge number of variables/coordinates. We analyze its complexity under the assumption that the smooth part of the objective function is partially block separable, and show that the degree of separability directly influences the complexity. This extends the results in [Richtarik, Takac: Parallel coordinate descent methods for big data optimization] to a distributed environment. We first show that partially block separable functions admit an expected separable overapproximation…
In this paper we consider large-scale smooth optimization problems with multiple linear coupled constraints. Due to the non-separability of the constraints, arbitrary random sketching would not be guaranteed to work. Thus, we first investigate necessary and sufficient conditions for the sketch sampling to have well-defined algorithms. Based on these sampling conditions we developed new sketch descent methods for solving general smooth linearly constrained problems, in particular, random sketch descent and accelerated random sketch descent methods. From our knowledge, this is the first converge…
We show how one can obtain nonaccelerated randomized coordinate descent method (Yu. Nesterov, 2010) and nonaccelerated method of randomization of sum-type functional (Le Roux-Schmidt-Bach, 2012) from the optimal method for the stochastic optimization problem (SIGMA, Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov-Dvurechensky-Gasnikov, 2014). The main trick is a special restart technique. We considered this trick to be usefull in others contexts. We consider only strongly convex case. We show that accelerated variants of this methods seems to be nontrivial in this context. That is, it is hard (perhaps impossible) t…
Randomized algorithms that base iteration-level decisions on samples from some pool are ubiquitous in machine learning and optimization. Examples include stochastic gradient descent and randomized coordinate descent. This paper makes progress at theoretically evaluating the difference in performance between sampling with- and without-replacement in such algorithms. Focusing on least means squares optimization, we formulate a noncommutative arithmetic-geometric mean inequality that would prove that the expected convergence rate of without-replacement sampling is faster than that of with-replace…
Snap Research（Snap 研究院）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
We study the proximal gradient descent (PGD) method for $\ell^{0}$ sparse approximation problem as well as its accelerated optimization with randomized algorithms in this paper. We first offer theoretical analysis of PGD showing the bounded gap between the sub-optimal solution by PGD and the globally optimal solution for the $\ell^{0}$ sparse approximation problem under conditions weaker than Restricted Isometry Property widely used in compressive sensing literature. Moreover, we propose randomized algorithms to accelerate the optimization by PGD using randomized low rank matrix approximation …
We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel combination of four ideas applied to the primal-dual gap function: smoothing, acceleration, homotopy, and coordinate descent with non-uniform sampling. As a result, our method features the first convergence rate guarantees among the coordinate descent methods, that are the best-known under a variety of common structure assumptions on the template. We provide numerical evidence to support the theoretical results with a comparison to state-of-the-art al…
Quantum information quantities play a substantial role in characterizing operational quantities in various quantum information-theoretic problems. We consider numerical computation of four quantum information quantities: Petz-Augustin information, sandwiched Augustin information, conditional sandwiched Renyi entropy and sandwiched Renyi information. To compute these quantities requires minimizing some order-$α$ quantum Renyi divergences over the set of quantum states. Whereas the optimization problems are obviously convex, they violate standard bounded gradient/Hessian conditions in literature…
Iowa State University（爱荷华州立大学）；IBM Research AI（IBM人工智能研究院）
We propose a new \textit{randomized Bregman (block) coordinate descent} (RBCD) method for minimizing a composite problem, where the objective function could be either convex or nonconvex, and the smooth part are freed from the global Lipschitz-continuous (partial) gradient assumption. Under the notion of relative smoothness based on the Bregman distance, we prove that every limit point of the generated sequence is a stationary point. Further, we show that the iteration complexity of the proposed method is $O(n\varepsilon^{-2})$ to achieve $ε$-stationary point, where $n$ is the number of blocks…
Minimizing a convex, quadratic objective of the form $f_{\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b}}(x) := \frac{1}{2}x^\top \mathbf{A} x - \langle \mathbf{b}, x \rangle$ for $\mathbf{A} \succ 0 $ is a fundamental problem in machine learning and optimization. In this work, we prove gradient-query complexity lower bounds for minimizing convex quadratic functions which apply to both deterministic and \emph{randomized} algorithms. Specifically, for $κ> 1$, we exhibit a distribution over $(\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b})$ with condition number $\mathrm{cond}(\mathbf{A}) \le κ$, such that any \emph{randomized} algorithm require…
Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Weizmann Institute of Science（魏茨曼科学研究所）
We study the iteration complexity of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for minimizing the gradient norm of smooth, possibly nonconvex functions. We provide several results, implying that the $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-4})$ upper bound of Ghadimi and Lan~\cite{ghadimi2013stochastic} (for making the average gradient norm less than $ε$) cannot be improved upon, unless a combination of additional assumptions is made. Notably, this holds even if we limit ourselves to convex quadratic functions. We also show that for nonconvex functions, the feasibility of minimizing gradients with SGD is surprisingly sensiti…
We consider an inertial primal-dual algorithm to compute the minimizations of the sum of two convex functions and the composition of another convex function with a continuous linear operator. With the idea of coordinate descent, we design a stochastic coordinate descent inertial primal-dual splitting algorithm. Moreover, in order to prove the convergence of the proposed inertial algorithm, we formulate first the inertial version of the randomized Krasnosel'skii-Mann iterations algorithm for approximating the set of fixed points of a nonexpansive operator and investigate its convergence propert…
Booth School of Business, University of Chicago（芝加哥大学布斯商学院）；MIT Sloan School of Management（麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院）；Operations Research Center（运筹学中心）；MIT Center for Statistics（麻省理工学院统计中心）
Gradient Boosting Machine (GBM) introduced by Friedman is a powerful supervised learning algorithm that is very widely used in practice---it routinely features as a leading algorithm in machine learning competitions such as Kaggle and the KDDCup. In spite of the usefulness of GBM in practice, our current theoretical understanding of this method is rather limited. In this work, we propose Randomized Gradient Boosting Machine (RGBM) which leads to substantial computational gains compared to GBM, by using a randomization scheme to reduce search in the space of weak-learners. We derive novel compu…
Shanghai University of Finance and Economics（上海财经大学）
Novel coordinate descent (CD) methods are proposed for minimizing nonconvex functions consisting of three terms: (i) a continuously differentiable term, (ii) a simple convex term, and (iii) a concave and continuous term. First, by extending randomized CD to nonsmooth nonconvex settings, we develop a coordinate subgradient method that randomly updates block-coordinate variables by using block composite subgradient mapping. This method converges asymptotically to critical points with proven sublinear convergence rate for certain optimality measures. Second, we develop a randomly permuted CD meth…
This monograph presents a class of algorithms called coordinate descent algorithms for mathematicians, statisticians, and engineers outside the field of optimization. This particular class of algorithms has recently gained popularity due to their effectiveness in solving large-scale optimization problems in machine learning, compressed sensing, image processing, and computational statistics. Coordinate descent algorithms solve optimization problems by successively minimizing along each coordinate or coordinate hyperplane, which is ideal for parallelized and distributed computing. Avoiding deta…
University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）；King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)（沙特国王 Abdullah 科技大学 (KAUST)）；MIPT（莫斯科物理技术学院）
In this paper we present a convergence rate analysis of inexact variants of several randomized iterative methods. Among the methods studied are: stochastic gradient descent, stochastic Newton, stochastic proximal point and stochastic subspace ascent. A common feature of these methods is that in their update rule a certain sub-problem needs to be solved exactly. We relax this requirement by allowing for the sub-problem to be solved inexactly. In particular, we propose and analyze inexact randomized iterative methods for solving three closely related problems: a convex stochastic quadratic optim…
In this work, we generalized and unified recent two completely different works of Jascha \cite{sohl2014fast} and Lee \cite{lee2012proximal} respectively into one by proposing the \textbf{prox}imal s\textbf{to}chastic \textbf{N}ewton-type gradient (PROXTONE) method for optimizing the sums of two convex functions: one is the average of a huge number of smooth convex functions, and the other is a non-smooth convex function. While a set of recently proposed proximal stochastic gradient methods, include MISO, Prox-SDCA, Prox-SVRG, and SAG, converge at linear rates, the PROXTONE incorporates second …
We study the problem of minimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a convex block-separable regularizer and propose a new randomized coordinate descent method, which we call ALPHA. Our method at every iteration updates a random subset of coordinates, following an arbitrary distribution. No coordinate descent methods capable to handle an arbitrary sampling have been studied in the literature before for this problem. ALPHA is a remarkably flexible algorithm: in special cases, it reduces to deterministic and randomized methods such as gradient descent, coordinate descent, parallel coordin…
We propose two Polyak-type step sizes for mirror descent and prove their convergences for minimizing convex locally Lipschitz functions. Both step sizes, unlike the original Polyak step size, do not need the optimal value of the objective function.
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔理工学院）；MSR-Inria Joint Centre（微软研究院-法国国家信息与自动化研究所联合中心）
We introduce the continuized Nesterov acceleration, a close variant of Nesterov acceleration whose variables are indexed by a continuous time parameter. The two variables continuously mix following a linear ordinary differential equation and take gradient steps at random times. This continuized variant benefits from the best of the continuous and the discrete frameworks: as a continuous process, one can use differential calculus to analyze convergence and obtain analytical expressions for the parameters; and a discretization of the continuized process can be computed exactly with convergence r…
We study ways to accelerate greedy coordinate descent in theory and in practice, where "accelerate" refers either to $O(1/k^2)$ convergence in theory, in practice, or both. We introduce and study two algorithms: Accelerated Semi-Greedy Coordinate Descent (ASCD) and Accelerated Greedy Coordinate Descent (AGCD). While ASCD takes greedy steps in the $x$-updates and randomized steps in the $z$-updates, AGCD is a straightforward extension of standard greedy coordinate descent that only takes greedy steps. On the theory side, our main results are for ASCD: we show that ASCD achieves $O(1/k^2)$ conve…
We study the first-order convex optimization problem, where we have black-box access to a (not necessarily smooth) function $f:\mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ and its (sub)gradient. Our goal is to find an $ε$-approximate minimum of $f$ starting from a point that is distance at most $R$ from the true minimum. If $f$ is $G$-Lipschitz, then the classic gradient descent algorithm solves this problem with $O((GR/ε)^{2})$ queries. Importantly, the number of queries is independent of the dimension $n$ and gradient descent is optimal in this regard: No deterministic or randomized algorithm can achieve be…
Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the measure and running non-convex gradient descent on the positions and weights of the particles. For measures on a $d$-dimensional manifold and under some non-degeneracy assumptions, this leads to a global optimization algorithm with a complexity scaling as $\log(1/ε)$ in the desired accuracy $ε$, instead of $ε^{-d}$ for convex methods. The key theoretical to…
Randomized Optimal Switching Problem and Related Mirror Descent Flow
School of Mathematical Sciences, Tongji University（同济大学数学科学学院）；Key Laboratory of Intelligent Computing and Applications (Tongji University), Ministry of Education（教育部智能计算与应用重点实验室（同济大学））
Inspired by the recent paper (L. Ying, Mirror descent algorithms for minimizing interacting free energy, Journal of Scientific Computing, 84 (2020), pp. 1-14),we explore the relationship between the mirror descent and the variable metric method. When the metric in the mirror decent is induced by a convex function, whose Hessian is close to the Hessian of the objective function, this method enjoys both robustness from the mirror descent and superlinear convergence for Newton type methods. When applied to a linearly constrained minimization problem, we prove the global and local convergence, bot…
The standard randomized sparse Kaczmarz (RSK) method is an algorithm to compute sparse solutions of linear systems of equations and uses sequential updates, and thus, does not take advantage of parallel computations. In this work, we introduce a parallel (mini batch) version of RSK based on averaging several Kaczmarz steps. Naturally, this method allows for parallelization and we show that it can also leverage large over-relaxation. We prove linear expected convergence and show that, given that parallel computations can be exploited, the method provably provides faster convergence than the sta…
In this paper we consider the problem of finding the minimizations of the sum of two convex functions and the composition of another convex function with a continuous linear operator. With the idea of coordinate descent, we design a stochastic coordinate descent primal-dual splitting algorithm with dynamic stepsize. Based on randomized Modified Krasnosel'skii-Mann iterations and the firmly nonexpansive properties of the proximity operator, we achieve the convergence of the proposed algorithms. Moreover, we give two applications of our method.
In this paper, we propose the Asynchronous Accelerated Nonuniform Randomized Block Coordinate Descent algorithm (A2BCD), the first asynchronous Nesterov-accelerated algorithm that achieves optimal complexity. This parallel algorithm solves the unconstrained convex minimization problem, using p computing nodes which compute updates to shared solution vectors, in an asynchronous fashion with no central coordination. Nodes in asynchronous algorithms do not wait for updates from other nodes before starting a new iteration, but simply compute updates using the most recent solution information avail…
School of Mathematics（数学学院）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
In this paper we consider the problem of minimizing a convex function using a randomized block coordinate descent method. One of the key steps at each iteration of the algorithm is determining the update to a block of variables. Existing algorithms assume that in order to compute the update, a particular subproblem is solved exactly. In his work we relax this requirement, and allow for the subproblem to be solved inexactly, leading to an inexact block coordinate descent method. Our approach incorporates the best known results for exact updates as a special case. Moreover, these theoretical gua…
