We derive global convergence bounds for the Frank Wolfe algorithm when training one hidden layer neural networks. When using the ReLU activation function, and under tractable preconditioning assumptions on the sample data set, the linear minimization oracle used to incrementally form the solution can be solved explicitly as a second order cone program. The classical Frank Wolfe algorithm then converges with rate $O(1/T)$ where $T$ is both the number of neurons and the number of calls to the oracle.
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm has regained much interest in its use in structurally constrained machine learning applications. However, one major limitation of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is the slow local convergence property due to the zig-zagging behavior. We observe the zig-zagging phenomenon in the Frank-Wolfe method as an artifact of discretization, and propose multistep Frank-Wolfe variants where the truncation errors decay as $O(Δ^p)$, where $p$ is the method's order. This strategy "stabilizes" the method, and allows tools like line search and momentum to have more benefits. However, our res…
Institut für Mathematik, Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学数学研究所）；Department for AI in Society, Science, and Technology, Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林楚泽研究所社会、科学与技术人工智能系）
We study the effects of constrained optimization formulations and Frank-Wolfe algorithms for obtaining interpretable neural network predictions. Reformulating the Rate-Distortion Explanations (RDE) method for relevance attribution as a constrained optimization problem provides precise control over the sparsity of relevance maps. This enables a novel multi-rate as well as a relevance-ordering variant of RDE that both empirically outperform standard RDE and other baseline methods in a well-established comparison test. We showcase several deterministic and stochastic variants of the Frank-Wolfe a…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
We study Frank-Wolfe methods for nonconvex stochastic and finite-sum optimization problems. Frank-Wolfe methods (in the convex case) have gained tremendous recent interest in machine learning and optimization communities due to their projection-free property and their ability to exploit structured constraints. However, our understanding of these algorithms in the nonconvex setting is fairly limited. In this paper, we propose nonconvex stochastic Frank-Wolfe methods and analyze their convergence properties. For objective functions that decompose into a finite-sum, we leverage ideas from varianc…
In 1956 Marguerite Frank and Paul Wolfe proved that a quadratic function which is bounded below on a polyhedron $P$ attains its infimum on $P$. In this work we search for larger classes of sets $F$ with this Frank-and-Wolfe property. We establish the existence of non-polyhedral Frank-and-Wolfe sets, obtain internal characterizations by way of asymptotic properties, and investigate stability of the Frank-and-Wolfe class under various operations.
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；SumUp Analytics（SumUp分析公司）；Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；MIT Sloan School of Management（麻省理工学院斯隆管理学院）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
We propose a novel Stochastic Frank-Wolfe (a.k.a. conditional gradient) algorithm for constrained smooth finite-sum minimization with a generalized linear prediction/structure. This class of problems includes empirical risk minimization with sparse, low-rank, or other structured constraints. The proposed method is simple to implement, does not require step-size tuning, and has a constant per-iteration cost that is independent of the dataset size. Furthermore, as a byproduct of the method we obtain a stochastic estimator of the Frank-Wolfe gap that can be used as a stopping criterion. Depending…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林祖斯研究所）
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm has become a popular first-order optimization algorithm for it is simple and projection-free, and it has been successfully applied to a variety of real-world problems. Its main drawback however lies in its convergence rate, which can be excessively slow due to naive descent directions. We propose to speed up the Frank-Wolfe algorithm by better aligning the descent direction with that of the negative gradient via a subroutine. This subroutine chases the negative gradient direction in a matching pursuit-style while still preserving the projection-free property. Although…
Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林祖斯研究所）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）
This paper studies the empirical efficacy and benefits of using projection-free first-order methods in the form of Conditional Gradients, a.k.a. Frank-Wolfe methods, for training Neural Networks with constrained parameters. We draw comparisons both to current state-of-the-art stochastic Gradient Descent methods as well as across different variants of stochastic Conditional Gradients. In particular, we show the general feasibility of training Neural Networks whose parameters are constrained by a convex feasible region using Frank-Wolfe algorithms and compare different stochastic variants. We th…
The Frank-Wolfe method is a popular method in sparse constrained optimization, due to its fast per-iteration complexity. However, the tradeoff is that its worst case global convergence is comparatively slow, and importantly, is fundamentally slower than its flow rate--that is to say, the convergence rate is throttled by discretization error. In this work, we consider a modified Frank-Wolfe where the step direction is a simple weighted average of past oracle calls. This method requires very little memory and computational overhead, and provably decays this discretization error term. Numerically…
The Frank-Wolfe method and its extensions are well-suited for delivering solutions with desirable structural properties, such as sparsity or low-rank structure. We introduce a new variant of the Frank-Wolfe method that combines Frank-Wolfe steps and steepest descent steps, as well as a novel modification of the "Frank-Wolfe gap" to measure convergence in the non-convex case. We further extend this method to incorporate in-face directions for preserving structured solutions as well as block coordinate steps, and we demonstrate computational guarantees in terms of the modified Frank-Wolfe gap fo…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) method is a popular algorithm for solving large-scale convex optimization problems appearing in structured statistical learning. However, the traditional Frank-Wolfe method can only be applied when the feasible region is bounded, which limits its applicability in practice. Motivated by two applications in statistical learning, the $\ell_1$ trend filtering problem and matrix optimization problems with generalized nuclear norm constraints, we study a family of convex optimization problems where the unbounded feasible region is the direct sum of an unbounded linear subspace a…
We present FrankWolfe.jl, an open-source implementation of several popular Frank-Wolfe and Conditional Gradients variants for first-order constrained optimization. The package is designed with flexibility and high-performance in mind, allowing for easy extension and relying on few assumptions regarding the user-provided functions. It supports Julia's unique multiple dispatch feature, and interfaces smoothly with generic linear optimization formulations using MathOptInterface.jl.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；JP Morgan AI Research（摩根大通人工智能研究院）
Hawkes processes have recently risen to the forefront of tools when it comes to modeling and generating sequential events data. Multidimensional Hawkes processes model both the self and cross-excitation between different types of events and have been applied successfully in various domain such as finance, epidemiology and personalized recommendations, among others. In this work we present an adaptation of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for learning multidimensional Hawkes processes. Experimental results show that our approach has better or on par accuracy in terms of parameter estimation than other…
We study Frank-Wolfe algorithms - standard, pairwise, and away-steps - for efficient optimization of Dominant Set Clustering. We present a unified and computationally efficient framework to employ the different variants of Frank-Wolfe methods, and we investigate its effectiveness via several experimental studies. In addition, we provide explicit convergence rates for the algorithms in terms of the so-called Frank-Wolfe gap. The theoretical analysis has been specialized to Dominant Set Clustering and covers consistently the different variants.
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm, a very first optimization method and also known as the conditional gradient method, was introduced by Frank and Wolfe in 1956. Due to its simple linear subproblems, the Frank-Wolfe algorithm has recently been received much attention for solving large-scale structured optimization problems arising from many applied areas such as signal processing and machine learning. In this paper we will discuss in detail the convergence analysis of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm in Banach spaces. Two ways of the selections of the stepsizes are discussed: the line minimization search met…
We propose several variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to minimize a sum of functions. The main proposed algorithm is inspired from the dual averaging scheme of Nesterov adapted for Frank Wolfe in a stochastic setting. A distributed version of this scheme is also suggested. Additionally, we propose a Frank-Wolfe variant based on incremental gradient techniques. The convergence rates for all the proposed algorithms are established. The performance is studied on least squares regression and multinomial classification.
We propose a variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm for solving a class of sparse/low-rank optimization problems. Our formulation includes Elastic Net, regularized SVMs and phase retrieval as special cases. The proposed Primal-Dual Block Frank-Wolfe algorithm reduces the per-iteration cost while maintaining linear convergence rate. The per iteration cost of our method depends on the structural complexity of the solution (i.e. sparsity/low-rank) instead of the ambient dimension. We empirically show that our algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on (multi-class) classification tasks.
We develop a novel variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm, which we call spectral Frank-Wolfe, for convex optimization over a spectrahedron. The spectral Frank-Wolfe algorithm has a novel ingredient: it computes a few eigenvectors of the gradient and solves a small-scale SDP in each iteration. Such procedure overcomes slow convergence of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm due to ignoring eigenvalue coalescence. We demonstrate that strict complementarity of the optimization problem is key to proving linear convergence of various algorithms, such as the spectral Frank-Wolfe algorithm as…
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
We demonstrate how to scalably solve a class of constrained self-concordant minimization problems using linear minimization oracles (LMO) over the constraint set. We prove that the number of LMO calls of our method is nearly the same as that of the Frank-Wolfe method in the L-smooth case. Specifically, our Newton Frank-Wolfe method uses $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-ν})$ LMO's, where $ε$ is the desired accuracy and $ν:= 1 + o(1)$. In addition, we demonstrate how our algorithm can exploit the improved variants of the LMO-based schemes, including away-steps, to attain linear convergence rates. We also provid…
Some boosting algorithms, such as LPBoost, ERLPBoost, and C-ERLPBoost, aim to solve the soft margin optimization problem with the $\ell_1$-norm regularization. LPBoost rapidly converges to an $ε$-approximate solution in practice, but it is known to take $Ω(m)$ iterations in the worst case, where $m$ is the sample size. On the other hand, ERLPBoost and C-ERLPBoost are guaranteed to converge to an $ε$-approximate solution in $O(\frac{1}{ε^2} \ln \frac{m}ν)$ iterations. However, the computation per iteration is very high compared to LPBoost. To address this issue, we propose a generic boosting sc…
Optimal transport (OT), which provides a distance between two probability distributions by considering their spatial locations, has been applied to widely diverse applications. Computing an OT problem requires solution of linear programming with tight mass-conservation constraints. This requirement hinders its application to large-scale problems. To alleviate this issue, the recently proposed relaxed-OT approach uses a faster algorithm by relaxing such constraints. Its effectiveness for practical applications has been demonstrated. Nevertheless, it still exhibits slow convergence. To this end,…
The Frank Wolfe algorithm (FW) is a popular projection-free alternative for solving large-scale constrained optimization problems. However, the FW algorithm suffers from a sublinear convergence rate when minimizing a smooth convex function over a compact convex set. Thus, exploring techniques that yield a faster convergence rate becomes crucial. A classic approach to obtain faster rates is to combine previous iterates to obtain the next iterate. In this work, we extend this approach to the FW setting and show that the optimal way to combine the past iterates is using a set of orthogonal Jacobi…
This paper uncovers a simple but rather surprising connection: it shows that the well-known convex-concave procedure (CCCP) and its generalization to constrained problems are both special cases of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) method. This connection not only provides insight of deep (in our opinion) pedagogical value, but also transfers the recently discovered convergence theory of nonconvex Frank-Wolfe methods immediately to CCCP, closing a long-standing gap in its non-asymptotic convergence theory. We hope the viewpoint uncovered by this paper spurs the transfer of other advances made for FW to both…
Invented some 65 years ago in a seminal paper by Marguerite Straus-Frank and Philip Wolfe, the Frank-Wolfe method recently enjoys a remarkable revival, fuelled by the need of fast and reliable first-order optimization methods in Data Science and other relevant application areas. This review tries to explain the success of this approach by illustrating versatility and applicability in a wide range of contexts, combined with an account on recent progress in variants, both improving on the speed and efficiency of this surprisingly simple principle of first-order optimization.
In this paper, we consider approximate Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithms to solve convex optimization problems over graph-structured support sets where the linear minimization oracle (LMO) cannot be efficiently obtained in general. We first demonstrate that two popular approximation assumptions (additive and multiplicative gap errors) are not applicable in that no cheap gap-approximate LMO oracle exists. Thus, approximate dual maximization oracles (DMO) are proposed, which approximate the inner product rather than the gap. We prove that the standard FW method using a $δ$-approximate DMO converges as…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
We propose a rank-$k$ variant of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve convex optimization over a trace-norm ball. Our algorithm replaces the top singular-vector computation ($1$-SVD) in Frank-Wolfe with a top-$k$ singular-vector computation ($k$-SVD), which can be done by repeatedly applying $1$-SVD $k$ times. Alternatively, our algorithm can be viewed as a rank-$k$ restricted version of projected gradient descent. We show that our algorithm has a linear convergence rate when the objective function is smooth and strongly convex, and the optimal solution has rank at most $k$. This impro…
We study the linear convergence of variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithms for some classes of strongly convex problems, using only affine-invariant quantities. As in Guelat & Marcotte (1986), we show the linear convergence of the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm when the solution is in the interior of the domain, but with affine invariant constants. We also show the linear convergence of the away-steps variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, but with constants which only depend on the geometry of the domain, and not any property of the location of the optimal solution. Running these algorithms doe…
In this paper, we show that the Away-step Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Algorithm (ASFW) and Pairwise Stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm (PSFW) converge linearly in expectation. We also show that if an algorithm convergences linearly in expectation then it converges linearly almost surely. In order to prove these results, we develop a novel proof technique based on concepts of empirical processes and concentration inequalities. Such a technique has rarely been used to derive the convergence rates of stochastic optimization algorithms. In large-scale numerical experiments, ASFW and PSFW perform as well …
Frank-Wolfe Algorithms for (L0, L1)-smooth functions
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Innopolis University（伊诺波利斯大学）；Adyghe State University（阿迪亚耶州立大学）；V. I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University（弗拉基米尔·伊万诺维奇·维尔纳茨基克里米亚联邦大学）
Machine Learning Laboratory, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院机器学习实验室）
We propose a randomized block-coordinate variant of the classic Frank-Wolfe algorithm for convex optimization with block-separable constraints. Despite its lower iteration cost, we show that it achieves a similar convergence rate in duality gap as the full Frank-Wolfe algorithm. We also show that, when applied to the dual structural support vector machine (SVM) objective, this yields an online algorithm that has the same low iteration complexity as primal stochastic subgradient methods. However, unlike stochastic subgradient methods, the block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe algorithm allows us to comp…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
We consider convex optimization problems which are widely used as convex relaxations for low-rank matrix recovery problems. In particular, in several important problems, such as phase retrieval and robust PCA, the underlying assumption in many cases is that the optimal solution is rank-one. In this paper we consider a simple and natural sufficient condition on the objective so that the optimal solution to these relaxations is indeed unique and rank-one. Mainly, we show that under this condition, the standard Frank-Wolfe method with line-search (i.e., without any tuning of parameters whatsoever…
University of Minnesota - Twin Cities（明尼苏达大学双城分校）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
We unveil the connections between Frank Wolfe (FW) type algorithms and the momentum in Accelerated Gradient Methods (AGM). On the negative side, these connections illustrate why momentum is unlikely to be effective for FW type algorithms. The encouraging message behind this link, on the other hand, is that momentum is useful for FW on a class of problems. In particular, we prove that a momentum variant of FW, that we term accelerated Frank Wolfe (AFW), converges with a faster rate $\tilde{\cal O}(\frac{1}{k^2})$ on certain constraint sets despite the same ${\cal O}(\frac{1}{k})$ rate as FW on …
The analysis of Frank Wolfe (FW) variants is often complicated by the presence of different kinds of "good" and "bad" steps. In this article we aim to simplify the convergence analysis of some of these variants by getting rid of such a distinction between steps, and to improve existing rates by ensuring a sizable decrease of the objective at each iteration. In order to do this, we define the Short Step Chain (SSC) procedure, which skips gradient computations in consecutive short steps until proper stopping conditions are satisfied. This technique allows us to give a unified analysis and conver…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；ENS Paris–Saclay（巴黎萨克雷高等师范学校）；Criteo Research, Paris（Criteo 研究院，巴黎）
We consider the problem of bandit optimization, inspired by stochastic optimization and online learning problems with bandit feedback. In this problem, the objective is to minimize a global loss function of all the actions, not necessarily a cumulative loss. This framework allows us to study a very general class of problems, with applications in statistics, machine learning, and other fields. To solve this problem, we analyze the Upper-Confidence Frank-Wolfe algorithm, inspired by techniques for bandits and convex optimization. We give theoretical guarantees for the performance of this algorit…
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm has seen a resurgence in popularity due to its ability to efficiently solve constrained optimization problems in machine learning and high-dimensional statistics. As such, there is much interest in establishing when the algorithm may possess a "linear" $O(\log(1/ε))$ dimension-free iteration complexity comparable to projected gradient descent. In this paper, we provide a general technique for establishing domain specific and easy-to-estimate lower bounds for Frank-Wolfe and its variants using the metric entropy of the domain. Most notably, we show that a dimension-fre…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
This paper proposes a new variant of Frank-Wolfe (FW), called $k$FW. Standard FW suffers from slow convergence: iterates often zig-zag as update directions oscillate around extreme points of the constraint set. The new variant, $k$FW, overcomes this problem by using two stronger subproblem oracles in each iteration. The first is a $k$ linear optimization oracle ($k$LOO) that computes the $k$ best update directions (rather than just one). The second is a $k$ direction search ($k$DS) that minimizes the objective over a constraint set represented by the $k$ best update directions and the previous…
The stochastic Frank-Wolfe method has recently attracted much general interest in the context of optimization for statistical and machine learning due to its ability to work with a more general feasible region. However, there has been a complexity gap in the guaranteed convergence rate for stochastic Frank-Wolfe compared to its deterministic counterpart. In this work, we present a new generalized stochastic Frank-Wolfe method which closes this gap for the class of structured optimization problems encountered in statistical and machine learning characterized by empirical loss minimization with …
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm has regained much interest in its use in structurally constrained machine learning applications. However, one major limitation of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is the slow local convergence property due to the zig-zagging behavior. We observe that this zig-zagging phenomenon can be viewed as an artifact of discretization, as when the method is viewed as an Euler discretization of a continuous time flow, that flow does not zig-zag. For this reason, we propose multistep Frank-Wolfe variants based on discretizations of the same flow whose truncation errors decay as $O(Δ^p)$,…
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
In recent years it was proved that simple modifications of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm (aka conditional gradient algorithm) for smooth convex minimization over convex and compact polytopes, converge with linear rate, assuming the objective function has the quadratic growth property. However, the rate of these methods depends explicitly on the dimension of the problem which cannot explain their empirical success for large scale problems. In this paper we first demonstrate that already for very simple problems and even when the optimal solution lies on a low-dimensional face of the polyt…
We introduce a few variants on Frank-Wolfe style algorithms suitable for large scale optimization. We show how to modify the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm using stochastic gradients, approximate subproblem solutions, and sketched decision variables in order to scale to enormous problems while preserving (up to constants) the optimal convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{k})$.
Unbalanced optimal transport (UOT) extends optimal transport (OT) to take into account mass variations to compare distributions. This is crucial to make OT successful in ML applications, making it robust to data normalization and outliers. The baseline algorithm is Sinkhorn, but its convergence speed might be significantly slower for UOT than for OT. In this work, we identify the cause for this deficiency, namely the lack of a global normalization of the iterates, which equivalently corresponds to a translation of the dual OT potentials. Our first contribution leverages this idea to develop a …
Scalable Frank-Wolfe on Generalized Self-concordant Functions via Simple Steps
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林祖斯研究所）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）
INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École normale supérieure, Paris（巴黎高等师范学院）；Netflix Inc.（Netflix公司）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）
We extend the Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization algorithm to solve constrained smooth convex-concave saddle point (SP) problems. Remarkably, the method only requires access to linear minimization oracles. Leveraging recent advances in FW optimization, we provide the first proof of convergence of a FW-type saddle point solver over polytopes, thereby partially answering a 30 year-old conjecture. We also survey other convergence results and highlight gaps in the theoretical underpinnings of FW-style algorithms. Motivating applications without known efficient alternatives are explored through structur…
