On the Convergence Time of Dual Subgradient Methods for Strongly Convex Programs
Hao Yu, Michael J. Neely
备注:
A short version is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. The current version extends the previous (CDC conference) version as follows: (1) simplify proofs; (2) relax the smooth dual function assumption in Sec IV by showing it always holds; (3) improve convergence time from $O(1/ε^{2/3})$ to $O(\log(1/ε))$ when dual function is locally quadratic
This paper studies the convergence time of dual gradient methods for general (possibly non-differentiable) strongly convex programs. For general convex programs, the convergence time of dual subgradient/gradient methods with simple running averages (running averages started from iteration $0$) is known to be $O(\frac{1}{ε^{2}})$. This paper shows that the convergence time for general strongly convex programs is $O(\frac{1}ε)$. This paper also considers a variation of the average scheme, called the sliding running averages, and shows that if the dual function of the strongly convex program is locally quadratic (Note that the locally quadratic property is implied by the locally strongly concave property.) then the convergence time of the dual gradient method with sliding running averages is $O(\log(\frac{1}ε))$. The convergence time analysis is further verified by numerical experiments.
In this work we consider an iterative method for solving the quasi-convex feasibility problem. We firstly introduce the so-called star subgradient projection operator and present some useful properties. We subsequently obtain a convergence result of the considered method by using properties of the introduced nonlinear operator.
Subgradient methods converge linearly on a convex function that grows sharply away from its solution set. In this work, we show that the same is true for sharp functions that are only weakly convex, provided that the subgradient methods are initialized within a fixed tube around the solution set. A variety of statistical and signal processing tasks come equipped with good initialization, and provably lead to formulations that are both weakly convex and sharp. Therefore, in such settings, subgradient methods can serve as inexpensive local search procedures. We illustrate the proposed techniques…
In this paper, we propose a new inexact version of the projected subgradient method to solve nondifferentiable constrained convex optimization problems. The method combine $ε$-subgradient method with a procedure to obtain a feasible inexact projection onto the constraint set. Asymptotic convergence results and iteration-complexity bounds for the sequence generated by the method employing the well known exogenous stepsizes, Polyak's stepsizes, and dynamic stepsizes are established.
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…
Numerous modern optimization and machine learning algorithms rely on subgradient information being trustworthy and hence, they may fail to converge when such information is corrupted. In this paper, we consider the setting where subgradient information may be arbitrarily corrupted (with a given probability) and study the robustness properties of the normalized subgradient method. Under the probabilistic corruption scenario, we prove that the normalized subgradient method, whose updates rely solely on directional information of the subgradient, converges to a minimizer for convex, strongly conv…
Quasi-convex optimization acts a pivotal part in many fields including economics and finance; the subgradient method is an effective iterative algorithm for solving large-scale quasi-convex optimization problems. In this paper, we investigate the iteration complexity and convergence rates of various subgradient methods for solving quasi-convex optimization in a unified framework. In particular, we consider a sequence satisfying a general (inexact) basic inequality, and investigate the global convergence theorem and the iteration complexity when using the constant, diminishing or dynamic stepsi…
We develop subgradient- and gradient-based methods for minimizing strongly convex functions under a notion which generalizes the standard Euclidean strong convexity. We propose a unifying framework for subgradient methods which yields two kinds of methods, namely, the Proximal Gradient Method (PGM) and the Conditional Gradient Method (CGM), unifying several existing methods. The unifying framework provides tools to analyze the convergence of PGMs and CGMs for non-smooth, (weakly) smooth, and further for structured problems such as the inexact oracle models. The proposed subgradient methods yie…
In this paper we present a variant of the proximal forward-backward splitting iteration for solving nonsmooth optimization problems in Hilbert spaces, when the objective function is the sum of two nondifferentiable convex functions. The proposed iteration, which will be called Proximal Subgradient Splitting Method, extends the classical subgradient iteration for important classes of problems, exploiting the additive structure of the objective function. The weak convergence of the generated sequence was established using different stepsizes and under suitable assumptions. Moreover, we analyze t…
Locating proximal points is a component of numerous minimization algorithms. This work focuses on developing a method to find the proximal point of a convex function at a point, given an inexact oracle. Our method assumes that exact function values are at hand, but exact subgradients are either not available or not useful. We use approximate subgradients to build a model of the objective function, and prove that the method converges to the true prox-point within acceptable tolerance. The subgradient $g_k$ used at each step $k$ is such that the distance from $g_k$ to the true subdifferential of…
In this paper, we present a new ellipsoid-type algorithm for solving nonsmooth problems with convex structure. Examples of such problems include nonsmooth convex minimization problems, convex-concave saddle-point problems and variational inequalities with monotone operator. Our algorithm can be seen as a combination of the standard Subgradient and Ellipsoid methods. However, in contrast to the latter one, the proposed method has a reasonable convergence rate even when the dimensionality of the problem is sufficiently large. For generating accuracy certificates in our algorithm, we propose an e…
We suggest a conjugate subgradient type method without any line-search for minimization of convex non differentiable functions. Unlike the custom methods of this class, it does not require monotone decrease of the goal function and reduces the implementation cost of each iteration essentially. At the same time, its step-size procedure takes into account behavior of the method along the iteration points. Preliminary results of computational experiments confirm efficiency of the proposed modification.
We present two approximate versions of the proximal subgradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions (not necessarily differentiable). The algorithms involve, at each iteration, inexact evaluations of the proximal operator and approximate subgradients of the functions (namely: the $ε$-subgradients). The methods use different error criteria for approximating the proximal operators. We provide an analysis of the convergence and rate of convergence properties of these methods, considering various stepsize rules, including both, diminishing and constant stepsizes. For the case whe…
This paper considers a general convex constrained problem setting where functions are not assumed to be differentiable nor Lipschitz continuous. Our motivation is in finding a simple first-order method for solving a wide range of convex optimization problems with minimal requirements. We study the method of weighted dual averages (Nesterov, 2009) in this setting and prove that it is an optimal method.
This paper deals with the convex feasibility problem, where the feasible set is given as the intersection of a (possibly infinite) number of closed convex sets. We assume that each set is specified algebraically as a convex inequality, where the associated convex function is general (possibly non-differentiable). For finding a point satisfying all the convex inequalities we design and analyze random projection algorithms using special subgradient iterations and extrapolated stepsizes. Moreover, the iterate updates are performed based on parallel random observations of several constraint compon…
Recently some specific classes of non-smooth and non-Lipschitz convex optimization problems were selected by Yu.~Nesterov along with H.~Lu. We consider convex programming problems with similar smoothness conditions for the objective function and functional constraints. We introduce a new concept of an inexact model and propose some analogues of switching subgradient schemes for convex programming problems for the relatively Lipschitz-continuous objective function and functional constraints. Some class of online convex optimization problems is considered. The proposed methods are optimal in the…
This paper introduces and studies the convergence properties of a new class of explicit $ε$-subgradient methods for the task of minimizing a convex function over the set of minimizers of another convex minimization problem. The general algorithm specializes to some important cases, such as first-order methods applied to a varying objective function, which have computationally cheap iterations. We present numerical experimentation regarding certain applications where the theoretical framework encompasses efficient algorithmic techniques, enabling the use of the resulting methods to solve very l…
In this paper, we study the convergence of an interior subgradient and proximal methods for a DC (difference of convex functions) constrained minimization problem.
We discuss non-Euclidean deterministic and stochastic algorithms for optimization problems with strongly and uniformly convex objectives. We provide accuracy bounds for the performance of these algorithms and design methods which are adaptive with respect to the parameters of strong or uniform convexity of the objective: in the case when the total number of iterations $N$ is fixed, their accuracy coincides, up to a logarithmic in $N$ factor with the accuracy of optimal algorithms.
In this article, the concepts of gH-subgradients and gH-subdifferentials of interval-valued functions are illustrated. Several important characteristics of the gH-subdifferential of a convex interval-valued function, e.g., closeness, boundedness, chain rule, etc. are studied. Alongside, we prove that gH-subdifferential of a gH-differentiable convex interval-valued function only contains gH-gradient of that interval-valued function. It is observed that the gH-directional derivative of a convex interval-valued function in each direction is maximum of all the products of gH-subgradients and the d…
This paper presents an algorithm for approximately minimizing a convex function in simple, not necessarily bounded convex domains, assuming only that function values and subgradients are available. No global information about the objective function is needed apart from a strong convexity parameter (which can be put to zero if only convexity is known). The worst case number of iterations needed to achieve a given accuracy is independent of the dimension (which may be infinite) and - apart from a constant factor - best possible under a variety of smoothness assumptions on the objective function.
The sum of ratios problem has a variety of important applications in economics and management science, but it is difficult to globally solve this problem. In this paper, we consider the minimization problem of a sum of a number of nondifferentiable quasi-convex component functions over a closed and convex set, which includes the sum of ratios problem as a special case. The sum of quasi-convex component functions is not necessarily to be quasi-convex, and so, this study goes beyond quasi-convex optimization. Exploiting the structure of the sum-minimization problem, we propose a new incremental …
We present a method for non-smooth convex minimization which is based on subgradient directions and string-averaging techniques. In this approach, the set of available data is split into sequences (strings) and a given iterate is processed independently along each string, possibly in parallel, by an incremental subgradient method (ISM). The end-points of all strings are averaged to form the next iterate. The method is useful to solve sparse and large-scale non-smooth convex optimization problems, such as those arising in tomographic imaging. A convergence analysis is provided under realistic, …
This paper shows that the optimal subgradient algorithm, OSGA, proposed in \cite{NeuO} can be used for solving structured large-scale convex constrained optimization problems. Only first-order information is required, and the optimal complexity bounds for both smooth and nonsmooth problems are attained. More specifically, we consider two classes of problems: (i) a convex objective with a simple closed convex domain, where the orthogonal projection on this feasible domain is efficiently available; (ii) a convex objective with a simple convex functional constraint. If we equip OSGA with an appro…
In this paper, we studied the equilibrium problem where the bi-function may be quasiconvex with respect to the second variable and the feasible set is the intersection of a finite number of convex sets. We propose a projection-algorithm, where the projection can be computed independently onto each component set. The convergence of the algorithm is investigated and numerical examples for a variational inequality problem involving affine fractional operator are provided to demonstrate the behavior of the algorithm.
The convex feasibility problem (CFP) is at the core of the modeling of many problems in various areas of science. Subgradient projection methods are important tools for solving the CFP because they enable the use of subgradient calculations instead of orthogonal projections onto the individual sets of the problem. Working in a real Hilbert space, we show that the sequential subgradient projection method is perturbation resilient. By this we mean that under appropriate conditions the sequence generated by the method converges weakly, and sometimes also strongly, to a point in the intersection o…
In recent years, important progress has been made in applying methods and techniques of convex optimization to many fields of applications such as location science, engineering, computational statistics, and computer science. In this paper, we present some simple algorithms for solving a number of new models of facility location involving sets which generalize the classical Fermat-Torricelli problem and the smallest enclosing circle problem. The general nondifferentiability of the models prevents us from applying gradient-type algorithms, so our approach is to use subgradient-type algorithms i…
A subgradient method is presented for solving general convex optimization problems, the main requirement being that a strictly-feasible point is known. A feasible sequence of iterates is generated, which converges to within user-specified error of optimality. Feasibility is maintained with a line-search at each iteration, avoiding the need for orthogonal projections onto the feasible region (the operation that limits practicality of traditional subgradient methods). Lipschitz continuity is not required, yet the algorithm is shown to possess a convergence rate analogous to rates for traditional…
This paper shows that the OSGA algorithm -- which uses first-order information to solve convex optimization problems with optimal complexity -- can be used to efficiently solve arbitrary bound-constrained convex optimization problems. This is done by constructing an explicit method as well as an inexact scheme for solving the bound-constrained rational subproblem required by OSGA. This leads to an efficient implementation of OSGA on large-scale problems in applications arising signal and image processing, machine learning and statistics. Numerical experiments demonstrate the promising performa…
In this paper we present a subgradient method with non-monotone line search for the minimization of convex functions with simple convex constraints. Different from the standard subgradient method with prefixed step sizes, the new method selects the step sizes in an adaptive way. Under mild conditions asymptotic convergence results and iteration-complexity bounds are obtained. Preliminary numerical results illustrate the relative efficiency of the proposed method.
A framework is presented whereby a general convex conic optimization problem is transformed into an equivalent convex optimization problem whose only constraints are linear equations and whose objective function is Lipschitz continuous. Virtually any subgradient method can be applied to solve the equivalent problem. Two methods are analyzed.
Subgradient methods comprise a fundamental class of nonsmooth optimization algorithms. Classical results show that certain subgradient methods converge sublinearly for general Lipschitz convex functions and converge linearly for convex functions that grow sharply away from solutions. Recent work has moreover extended these results to certain nonconvex problems. In this work we seek to improve the complexity of these algorithms, asking: is it possible to design a superlinearly convergent subgradient method? We provide a positive answer to this question for a broad class of sharp semismooth func…
Optimization models with non-convex constraints arise in many tasks in machine learning, e.g., learning with fairness constraints or Neyman-Pearson classification with non-convex loss. Although many efficient methods have been developed with theoretical convergence guarantees for non-convex unconstrained problems, it remains a challenge to design provably efficient algorithms for problems with non-convex functional constraints. This paper proposes a class of subgradient methods for constrained optimization where the objective function and the constraint functions are weakly convex and nonsmoot…
We consider a multi-agent optimization problem where agents subject to local, intermittent interactions aim to minimize a sum of local objective functions subject to a global inequality constraint and a global state constraint set. In contrast to previous work, we do not require that the objective, constraint functions, and state constraint sets to be convex. In order to deal with time-varying network topologies satisfying a standard connectivity assumption, we resort to consensus algorithm techniques and the Lagrangian duality method. We slightly relax the requirement of exact consensus, and …
Two distributed algorithms are described that enable all users connected over a network to cooperatively solve the problem of minimizing the sum of all users' objective functions over the intersection of all users' constraint sets, where each user has its own private nonsmooth convex objective function and closed convex constraint set, which is the intersection of a number of simple, closed convex sets. One algorithm enables each user to adjust its estimate by using a proximity operator of its objective function and the metric projection onto one set randomly selected from the simple, closed c…
The paper proposes a heterogeneous push-sum based subgradient algorithm for multi-agent distributed convex optimization in which each agent can arbitrarily switch between subgradient-push and push-subgradient at each time. It is shown that the heterogeneous algorithm converges to an optimal point at an optimal rate over time-varying directed graphs.
We prove that the proximal stochastic subgradient method, applied to a weakly convex problem, drives the gradient of the Moreau envelope to zero at the rate $O(k^{-1/4})$. As a consequence, we resolve an open question on the convergence rate of the proximal stochastic gradient method for minimizing the sum of a smooth nonconvex function and a convex proximable function.
This paper concerns the study of a broad class of minimal time functions corresponding to control problems with constant convex dynamics and closed target sets in arbitrary Banach spaces. In contrast to other publications, we do not impose any nonempty interior and/or calmness assumptions on the initial data and deal with generally non-Lipschitzian minimal time functions. The major results present refined formulas for computing various subgradients of minimal time functions under minimal requirements in both cases of convex and nonconvex targets. Our technique is based on advanced tools of var…
The subgradient method for convex optimization problems on complete Riemannian manifolds with lower bounded sectional curvature is analyzed in this paper. Iteration-complexity bounds of the subgradient method with exogenous step-size and Polyak's step-size are stablished, completing and improving recent results on the subject.
In this paper we consider convergence rate problems for stochastic strongly-convex optimization in the non-Euclidean sense with a constraint set over a time-varying multi-agent network. We propose two efficient non-Euclidean stochastic subgradient descent algorithms based on the Bregman divergence as distance-measuring function rather than the Euclidean distances that were employed by the standard distributed stochastic projected subgradient algorithms. For distributed optimization of nonsmooth and strongly convex functions whose only stochastic subgradients are available, the first algorithm …
In a recent paper, we showed that the stochastic subgradient method applied to a weakly convex problem, drives the gradient of the Moreau envelope to zero at the rate $O(k^{-1/4})$. In this supplementary note, we present a stochastic subgradient method for minimizing a convex function, with the improved rate $\widetilde O(k^{-1/2})$.
Integrally convex functions constitute a fundamental function class in discrete convex analysis. This paper shows that an integer-valued integrally convex function admits an integral subgradient and that the integral biconjugate of an integer-valued integrally convex function coincides with itself. The proof is based on the Fourier-Motzkin elimination. The latter result provides a unified proof of integral biconjugacy for various classes of integer-valued discrete convex functions, including L-convex, M-convex, L$_{2}$-convex, M$_{2}$-convex, BS-convex, and UJ-convex functions as well as multi…
In this paper, we show that simple {Stochastic} subGradient Decent methods with multiple Restarting, named {\bf RSGD}, can achieve a \textit{linear convergence rate} for a class of non-smooth and non-strongly convex optimization problems where the epigraph of the objective function is a polyhedron, to which we refer as {\bf polyhedral convex optimization}. Its applications in machine learning include $\ell_1$ constrained or regularized piecewise linear loss minimization and submodular function minimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result on the linear convergence rate o…