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 the approach is reasonably natural, it produces very significant results. We derive convergence rates $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ to $\mathcal{O}(e^{-ωt})$ of our method and we demonstrate its competitive advantage both per iteration and in CPU time over the state-of-the-art in a series of computational experiments.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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）
MILA；DIRO；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Minimizing a function over an intersection of convex sets is an important task in optimization that is often much more challenging than minimizing it over each individual constraint set. While traditional methods such as Frank-Wolfe (FW) or proximal gradient descent assume access to a linear or quadratic oracle on the intersection, splitting techniques take advantage of the structure of each sets, and only require access to the oracle on the individual constraints. In this work, we develop and analyze the Frank-Wolfe Augmented Lagrangian (FW-AL) algorithm, a method for minimizing a smooth func…
The Frank-Wolfe (FW) optimization algorithm has lately re-gained popularity thanks in particular to its ability to nicely handle the structured constraints appearing in machine learning applications. However, its convergence rate is known to be slow (sublinear) when the solution lies at the boundary. A simple less-known fix is to add the possibility to take 'away steps' during optimization, an operation that importantly does not require a feasibility oracle. In this paper, we highlight and clarify several variants of the Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm that have been successfully applied in…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Technische Universität Berlin（柏林工业大学）；Zuse Institute Berlin（柏林楚泽研究所）
The approximate Carathéodory theorem states that given a compact convex set $\mathcal{C}\subset\mathbb{R}^n$ and $p\in\left[2,+\infty\right[$, each point $x^*\in\mathcal{C}$ can be approximated to $ε$-accuracy in the $\ell_p$-norm as the convex combination of $\mathcal{O}(pD_p^2/ε^2)$ vertices of $\mathcal{C}$, where $D_p$ is the diameter of $\mathcal{C}$ in the $\ell_p$-norm. A solution satisfying these properties can be built using probabilistic arguments or by applying mirror descent to the dual problem. We revisit the approximate Carathéodory problem by solving the primal problem via the F…
Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics（魏尔斯特拉斯应用分析和随机研究所）；HSE University（俄罗斯高等经济学院）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）；Maastricht University（马斯特里赫特大学）
Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW), a.k.a. Conditional Gradient method has become one of the cornerstones in optimization for machine learning since in many cases the linear minimization oracle is much cheaper to implement than projections and some sparsity needs to be preserved. In a number of applications, e.g. Poisson inverse problems or quantum state tomography, the loss is given by a self-concordant (SC) function having unbounded curvature, implying absence of theoretical guarantees for the existing FW methods. We use the theory of SC functions to …
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
One of the beauties of the projected gradient descent method lies in its rather simple mechanism and yet stable behavior with inexact, stochastic gradients, which has led to its wide-spread use in many machine learning applications. However, once we replace the projection operator with a simpler linear program, as is done in the Frank-Wolfe method, both simplicity and stability take a serious hit. The aim of this paper is to bring them back without sacrificing the efficiency. In this paper, we propose the first one-sample stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm, called 1-SFW, that avoids the need to …
The optimal transport (OT) problem has been used widely for machine learning. It is necessary for computation of an OT problem to solve linear programming with tight mass-conservation constraints. These constraints prevent its application to large-scale problems. To address this issue, loosening such constraints enables us to propose the relaxed-OT method using a faster algorithm. This approach has demonstrated its effectiveness for applications. However, it remains slow. As a superior alternative, we propose a fast block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe (BCFW) algorithm for a convex semi-relaxed OT. Sp…
We analyze two novel randomized variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) or conditional gradient algorithm. While classical FW algorithms require solving a linear minimization problem over the domain at each iteration, the proposed method only requires to solve a linear minimization problem over a small \emph{subset} of the original domain. The first algorithm that we propose is a randomized variant of the original FW algorithm and achieves a $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$ sublinear convergence rate as in the deterministic counterpart. The second algorithm is a randomized variant of the Away-step FW algorithm, an…
ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；EPFL（洛桑联邦理工学院）
Two of the most fundamental prototypes of greedy optimization are the matching pursuit and Frank-Wolfe algorithms. In this paper, we take a unified view on both classes of methods, leading to the first explicit convergence rates of matching pursuit methods in an optimization sense, for general sets of atoms. We derive sublinear ($1/t$) convergence for both classes on general smooth objectives, and linear convergence on strongly convex objectives, as well as a clear correspondence of algorithm variants. Our presented algorithms and rates are affine invariant, and do not need any incoherence or …
Deep neural networks is today one of the most popular choices in classification, regression and function approximation. However, the training of such deep networks is far from trivial as there are often millions of parameters to tune. Typically, one use some optimization method that hopefully converges towards some minimum. The most popular and successful methods are based on gradient descent. In this paper, another optimization method, Frank-Wolfe optimization, is applied to a small deep network and compared to gradient descent. Although the optimization does converge, it does so slowly and n…
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne（洛桑联邦理工学院）；Télécom Paris（巴黎高等电信学院）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）
A broad class of convex optimization problems can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), minimization of a convex function over the positive-semidefinite cone subject to some affine constraints. The majority of classical SDP solvers are designed for the deterministic setting where problem data is readily available. In this setting, generalized conditional gradient methods (aka Frank-Wolfe-type methods) provide scalable solutions by leveraging the so-called linear minimization oracle instead of the projection onto the semidefinite cone. Most problems in machine learning and modern engin…
We study projection-free methods for constrained Riemannian optimization. In particular, we propose the Riemannian Frank-Wolfe (RFW) method. We analyze non-asymptotic convergence rates of RFW to an optimum for (geodesically) convex problems, and to a critical point for nonconvex objectives. We also present a practical setting under which RFW can attain a linear convergence rate. As a concrete example, we specialize RFW to the manifold of positive definite matrices and apply it to two tasks: (i) computing the matrix geometric mean (Riemannian centroid); and (ii) computing the Bures-Wasserstein …
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
How can we efficiently mitigate the overhead of gradient communications in distributed optimization? This problem is at the heart of training scalable machine learning models and has been mainly studied in the unconstrained setting. In this paper, we propose Quantized-Frank-Wolfe (QFW), the first projection-free and communication-efficient algorithm for solving constrained optimization problems at scale. We consider both convex and non-convex objective functions, expressed as a finite-sum or more generally a stochastic optimization problem, and provide strong theoretical guarantees on the conv…
We propose a novel and efficient training method for RNNs by iteratively seeking a local minima on the loss surface within a small region, and leverage this directional vector for the update, in an outer-loop. We propose to utilize the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm in this context. Although, FW implicitly involves normalized gradients, which can lead to a slow convergence rate, we develop a novel RNN training method that, surprisingly, even with the additional cost, the overall training cost is empirically observed to be lower than back-propagation. Our method leads to a new Frank-Wolfe method, t…
Large-scale machine learning training suffers from two prior challenges, specifically for nuclear-norm constrained problems with distributed systems: the synchronization slowdown due to the straggling workers, and high communication costs. In this work, we propose an asynchronous Stochastic Frank Wolfe (SFW-asyn) method, which, for the first time, solves the two problems simultaneously, while successfully maintaining the same convergence rate as the vanilla SFW. We implement our algorithm in python (with MPI) to run on Amazon EC2, and demonstrate that SFW-asyn yields speed-ups almost linear to…
In this work, we propose an infinite restricted Boltzmann machine~(RBM), whose maximum likelihood estimation~(MLE) corresponds to a constrained convex optimization. We consider the Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve the program, which provides a sparse solution that can be interpreted as inserting a hidden unit at each iteration, so that the optimization process takes the form of a sequence of finite models of increasing complexity. As a side benefit, this can be used to easily and efficiently identify an appropriate number of hidden units during the optimization. The resulting model can also be u…
Sarah Frank-Wolfe: Methods for Constrained Optimization with Best Rates and Practical Features
Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学）；Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科技学院）；Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Yandex（Yandex公司）；Mila（米拉研究所）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
We present a novel algorithm to estimate the barycenter of arbitrary probability distributions with respect to the Sinkhorn divergence. Based on a Frank-Wolfe optimization strategy, our approach proceeds by populating the support of the barycenter incrementally, without requiring any pre-allocation. We consider discrete as well as continuous distributions, proving convergence rates of the proposed algorithm in both settings. Key elements of our analysis are a new result showing that the Sinkhorn divergence on compact domains has Lipschitz continuous gradient with respect to the Total Variation…
Institut Mines-Telecom, Telecom ParisTech, CNRS LTCI（法国矿业电信研究院，巴黎高等电信学院，法国国家科学研究中心LTCI）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Ecole Polytechnique（巴黎综合理工学院）
In this paper, the online variants of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm are considered. We consider minimizing the regret with a stochastic cost. The online algorithms only require simple iterative updates and a non-adaptive step size rule, in contrast to the hybrid schemes commonly considered in the literature. Several new results are derived for convex and non-convex losses. With a strongly convex stochastic cost and when the optimal solution lies in the interior of the constraint set or the constraint set is a polytope, the regret bound and anytime optimality are shown to be ${\cal O}( \l…
In this paper, we consider the problem of selecting representatives from a data set for arbitrary supervised/unsupervised learning tasks. We identify a subset $S$ of a data set $A$ such that 1) the size of $S$ is much smaller than $A$ and 2) $S$ efficiently describes the entire data set, in a way formalized via convex optimization. In order to generate $|S| = k$ exemplars, our kernelizable algorithm, Frank-Wolfe Sparse Representation (FWSR), only needs to execute $\approx k$ iterations with a per-iteration cost that is quadratic in the size of $A$. This is in contrast to other state of the art…
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.
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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.
