This paper regards randomized discrete-time consensus systems that preserve the average "on average". As a main result, we provide an upper bound on the mean square deviation of the consensus value from the initial average. Then, we apply our result to systems where few or weakly correlated interactions take place: these assumptions cover several algorithms proposed in the literature. For such systems we show that, when the network size grows, the deviation tends to zero, and the speed of this decay is not slower than the inverse of the size. Our results are based on a new approach, which is unrelated to the convergence properties of the system.
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 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…
Block coordinate descent methods and stochastic subgradient methods have been extensively studied in optimization and machine learning. By combining randomized block sampling with stochastic subgradient methods based on dual averaging, we present stochastic block dual averaging (SBDA)---a novel class of block subgradient methods for convex nonsmooth and stochastic optimization. SBDA requires only a block of subgradients and updates blocks of variables and hence has significantly lower iteration cost than traditional subgradient methods. We show that the SBDA-based methods exhibit the optimal c…
Motivated by multi-user optimization problems and non-cooperative Nash games in uncertain regimes, we consider stochastic Cartesian variational inequalities (SCVI) where the set is given as the Cartesian product of a collection of component sets. First, we consider the case where the number of the component sets is large. For solving this type of problems, the classical stochastic approximation methods and their prox generalizations are computationally inefficient as each iteration becomes very costly. To address this challenge, we develop a randomized block stochastic mirror-prox (B-SMP) algo…
The effective resistance between a pair of nodes in a weighted undirected graph is defined as the potential difference induced when a unit current is injected at one node and extracted from the other, treating edge weights as the conductance values of edges. The effective resistance is a key quantity of interest in many applications, e.g., solving linear systems, Markov Chains, and continuous-time averaging networks. We consider effective resistances (ER) in the context of designing randomized gossiping methods for the consensus problem, where the aim is to compute the average of node values i…
The Extended Randomized Kaczmarz method is a well known iterative scheme which can find the Moore-Penrose inverse solution of a possibly inconsistent linear system and requires only one additional column of the system matrix in each iteration in comparison with the standard randomized Kaczmarz method. Also, the Sparse Randomized Kaczmarz method has been shown to converge linearly to a sparse solution of a consistent linear system. Here, we combine both ideas and propose an Extended Sparse Randomized Kaczmarz method. We show linear expected convergence to a sparse least squares solution in the …
We provide an exact analysis of a class of randomized algorithms for solving overdetermined least-squares problems. We consider first-order methods, where the gradients are pre-conditioned by an approximation of the Hessian, based on a subspace embedding of the data matrix. This class of algorithms encompasses several randomized methods among the fastest solvers for least-squares problems. We focus on two classical embeddings, namely, Gaussian projections and subsampled randomized Hadamard transforms (SRHT). Our key technical innovation is the derivation of the limiting spectral density of SRH…
Randomized regularized Kaczmarz algorithms have recently been proposed to solve tensor recovery models with {\it consistent} linear measurements. In this work, we propose a novel algorithm based on the randomized extended Kaczmarz algorithm (which converges linearly in expectation to the unique minimum norm least squares solution of a linear system) for tensor recovery models with {\it inconsistent} linear measurements. We prove the linear convergence in expectation of our algorithm. Numerical experiments on a tensor least squares problem and a sparse tensor recovery problem are given to illus…
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 Algorithms for Symmetric Nonnegative Matrix Factorization
School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院计算科学与工程学院）；Pacific Northwest National Laboratory（太平洋西北国家实验室）；Dept. of Computer Science, Wake Forest University（维克森林大学计算机科学系）
In tabular multi-agent reinforcement learning with average-cost criterion, a team of agents sequentially interacts with the environment and observes local incentives. We focus on the case that the global reward is a sum of local rewards, the joint policy factorizes into agents' marginals, and full state observability. To date, few global optimality guarantees exist even for this simple setting, as most results yield convergence to stationarity for parameterized policies in large/possibly continuous spaces. To solidify the foundations of MARL, we build upon linear programming (LP) reformulation…
Worth Their Weight: Randomized and Regularized Block Kaczmarz Algorithms without Preprocessing
Department of Mathematics, UC Berkeley（数学系，加州大学伯克利分校）；Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（应用数学与计算研究部，劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）
We study randomized sketching methods for approximately solving least-squares problem with a general convex constraint. The quality of a least-squares approximation can be assessed in different ways: either in terms of the value of the quadratic objective function (cost approximation), or in terms of some distance measure between the approximate minimizer and the true minimizer (solution approximation). Focusing on the latter criterion, our first main result provides a general lower bound on any randomized method that sketches both the data matrix and vector in a least-squares problem; as a su…
