We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number of component mappings or the expectation over a family of random component mappings. We propose a class of stochastic variance-reduced prox-linear algorithms for solving such problems and bound their sample complexities for finding an $ε$-stationary point in terms of the total number of evaluations of the component mappings and their Jacobians. When $g$ is a finite average of $N$ components, we obtain sample complexity $\mathcal{O}(N+ N^{4/5}ε^{-1})$ for both mapping and Jacobian evaluations. When $g$ is a general expectation, we obtain sample complexities of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-5/2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3/2})$ for component mappings and their Jacobians respectively. If in addition $f$ is smooth, then improved sample complexities of $\mathcal{O}(N+N^{1/2}ε^{-1})$ and $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3/2})$ are derived for $g$ being a finite average and a general expectation respectively, for both component mapping and Jacobian evaluations.
This thesis focuses on developing and analyzing accelerated and inexact first-order methods for solving or finding stationary points of various nonconvex composite optimization (NCO) problems. The main tools mainly come from variational and convex analysis, and the key results are in the form of iteration complexity bounds and how these bounds compare to other ones in the literature.
This paper describes and establishes the iteration-complexity of a doubly accelerated inexact proximal point (D-AIPP) method for solving the nonconvex composite minimization problem whose objective function is of the form $f+h$ where $f$ is a (possibly nonconvex) differentiable function whose gradient is Lipschitz continuous and $h$ is a closed convex function with bounded domain. D-AIPP performs two types of iterations, namely, inner and outer ones. Its outer iterations correspond to the ones of the accelerated inexact proximal point scheme. Its inner iterations are the ones performed by an a…
This paper presents two inexact composite gradient methods, one inner accelerated and another doubly accelerated, for solving a class of nonconvex spectral composite optimization problems. More specifically, the objective function for these problems is of the form $f_1 + f_2 + h$ where $f_1$ and $f_2$ are differentiable nonconvex matrix functions with Lipschitz continuous gradients, $h$ is a proper closed convex matrix function, and both $f_2$ and $h$ can be expressed as functions that operate on the singular values of their inputs. The methods essentially use an accelerated composite gradient…
The proximal gradient algorithm has been popularly used for convex optimization. Recently, it has also been extended for nonconvex problems, and the current state-of-the-art is the nonmonotone accelerated proximal gradient algorithm. However, it typically requires two exact proximal steps in each iteration, and can be inefficient when the proximal step is expensive. In this paper, we propose an efficient proximal gradient algorithm that requires only one inexact (and thus less expensive) proximal step in each iteration. Convergence to a critical point %of the nonconvex problem is still guarant…
In this article, we study $gH$-subdifferential calculus of convex interval-valued functions (IVFs) and apply it in a nonconvex composite model of interval optimization problems (IOPs). It is found that the $gH$-directional derivative of maximum of finitely many comparable IVFs is the maximum of their $gH$-directional derivative. Proposed concepts of $gH$-subdifferential are observed to be useful to derive Fritz-John-type and KKT-type efficiency conditions for weak efficient solutions of IOPs. Further, we extract a necessary and sufficient condition to characterize the weak efficient solutions …
This paper presents an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variant, referred to as the AC-ACG method, for solving nonconvex smooth composite minimization problems. As opposed to well-known ACG variants that are either based on a known Lipschitz gradient constant or a sequence of maximum observed curvatures, the current one is based on the average of all past observed curvatures. More specifically, AC-ACG uses a positive multiple of the average of all observed curvatures until the previous iteration as a way to estimate the "function curvature" at the current point and then two resolvent evalu…
The alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMM) has been one of most powerful and successful methods for solving various composite problems. The convergence of the conventional ADMM (i.e., 2-block) for convex objective functions has been justified for a long time, and its convergence for nonconvex objective functions has, however, been established very recently. The multi-block ADMM, a natural extension of ADMM, is a widely used scheme and has also been found very useful in solving various nonconvex optimization problems. It is thus expected to establish convergence theory of the mult…
The proximal point method for a special class of nonconvex multiobjective functions is studied in this paper. We show that the method is well defined and that the accumulation points of any generated sequence, if any, are Pareto--Clarke critical points. Moreover, under additional assumptions, we show the full convergence of the generated sequence.
The alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMM) has been one of most powerful and successful methods for solving various convex or nonconvex composite problems that arise in the fields of image & signal processing and machine learning. In convex settings, numerous convergence results have been established for ADMM as well as its varieties. However, due to the absence of convexity, the convergence analysis of nonconvex ADMM is generally very difficult. In this paper we study the Bregman modification of ADMM (BADMM), which includes the conventional ADMM as a special case and often leads…
A previous authors' paper introduces an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variant, namely AC-ACG, for solving nonconvex smooth composite optimization (N-SCO) problems. In contrast to other ACG variants, AC-ACG estimates the local upper curvature of the N-SCO problem by using the average of the observed upper-Lipschitz curvatures obtained during the previous iterations, and uses this estimation and two composite resolvent evaluations to compute the next iterate. This paper presents an alternative FISTA-type ACG variant, namely AC-FISTA, which has the following additional features: i) it perf…
This paper proposes and analyzes a proximal augmented Lagrangian (NL-IAPIAL) method for solving smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems with nonlinear $\cal K$-convex constraints, i.e., the constraints are convex with respect to the order given by a closed convex cone $\cal K$. Each NL-IAPIAL iteration consists of inexactly solving a proximal augmented Lagrangian subproblem by an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) method followed by a Lagrange multiplier update. Under some mild assumptions, it is shown that NL-IAPIAL generates an approximate stationary solution of the constrained pr…
Stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with nonlinear constraints have a broad range of applications in intelligent transportation, cyber-security, and smart grids. In this paper, first, we propose an inexact-proximal accelerated gradient method to solve a nonconvex stochastic composite optimization problem where the objective is the sum of smooth and nonsmooth functions, the constraint functions are assumed to be deterministic and the solution to the proximal map of the nonsmooth part is calculated inexactly at each iteration. We demonstrate an asymptotic sublinear rate of convergence for…
In this paper we propose a second--order method for solving \emph{linear composite sparse optimization problems} consisting of minimizing the sum of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex function) and a nondifferentiable convex term. The composite nondifferentiable convex penalizer is given by $\ell_1$--norm of a matrix multiplied with the coefficient vector. The algorithm that we propose for the case of the linear composite $\ell_1$ problem relies on the three main ingredients that power the OESOM algorithm \cite{dlrlm07}: the minimum norm subgradient, a projection step and, in particular, the…
We study the convergence properties of a general inertial first-order proximal splitting algorithm for solving nonconvex nonsmooth optimization problems. Using the Kurdyka--Łojaziewicz (KL) inequality we establish new convergence rates which apply to several inertial algorithms in the literature. Our basic assumption is that the objective function is semialgebraic, which lends our results broad applicability in the fields of signal processing and machine learning. The convergence rates depend on the exponent of the "desingularizing function" arising in the KL inequality. Depending on this expo…
Many optimization problems arising in high-dimensional statistics decompose naturally into a sum of several terms, where the individual terms are relatively simple but the composite objective function can only be optimized with iterative algorithms. In this paper, we are interested in optimization problems of the form F(Kx) + G(x), where K is a fixed linear transformation, while F and G are functions that may be nonconvex and/or nondifferentiable. In particular, if either of the terms are nonconvex, existing alternating minimization techniques may fail to converge; other types of existing appr…
Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their generalizations like proximal Newton and quasi-Newton methods. In this paper, we propose a regularized proximal quasi-Newton method whose main features are: (a) the method is globally convergent to stationary points, (b) the globalization is controlled by a regularization parameter, no line search is required, (c) the method can be implemented very efficientl…
Minimax problems, such as generative adversarial network, adversarial training, and fair training, are widely solved by a multi-step gradient descent ascent (MGDA) method in practice. However, its convergence guarantee is limited. In this paper, inspired by the primal-dual hybrid gradient method, we propose a new semi-anchoring (SA) technique for the MGDA method. This makes the MGDA method find a stationary point of a structured nonconvex-nonconcave composite minimax problem; its saddle-subdifferential operator satisfies the weak Minty variational inequality condition. The resulting method, na…
This paper proposes and analyzes an accelerated inexact dampened augmented Lagrangian (AIDAL) method for solving linearly-constrained nonconvex composite optimization problems. Each iteration of the AIDAL method consists of: (i) inexactly solving a dampened proximal augmented Lagrangian (AL) subproblem by calling an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) subroutine; (ii) applying a dampened and under-relaxed Lagrange multiplier update; and (iii) using a novel test to check whether the penalty parameter of the AL function should be increased. Under several mild assumptions involving the dampening…
This work presents an adaptive superfast proximal augmented Lagrangian (AS-PAL) method for solving linearly-constrained smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. Each iteration of AS-PAL inexactly solves a possibly nonconvex proximal augmented Lagrangian (AL) subproblem obtained by an aggressive/adaptive choice of prox stepsize with the aim of substantially improving its computational performance followed by a full Lagrangian multiplier update. A major advantage of AS-PAL compared to other AL methods is that it requires no knowledge of parameters (e.g., size of constraint matrix, objec…
This paper proposes and establishes the iteration-complexity of an inexact proximal accelerated augmented Lagrangian (IPAAL) method for solving linearly constrained smooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. Each IPAAL iteration consists of inexactly solving a proximal augmented Lagrangian subproblem by an accelerated composite gradient (ACG) method followed by a suitable Lagrange multiplier update. It is shown that IPAAL generates an approximate stationary solution in at most ${\cal O}(\log(1/ρ)/ρ^{3})$ ACG iterations, where $ρ>0$ is the given tolerance. It is also shown that the previ…
This paper analyzes the iteration-complexity of a quadratic penalty accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving linearly constrained nonconvex composite programs. More specifically, the objective function is of the form $f + h$ where $f$ is a differentiable function whose gradient is Lipschitz continuous and $h$ is a closed convex function with bounded domain. The method, basically, consists of applying an accelerated inexact proximal point method for solving approximately a sequence of quadratic penalized subproblems associated to the linearly constrained problem. Each subproblem of…
In this paper, we consider a proximal linearized alternating direction method of multipliers (PL-ADMM) for solving linearly constrained nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth optimization problems. The algorithm is generalized by using variable metric proximal terms in the primal updates and an over-relaxation stepsize in the multiplier update. We prove that the sequence generated by this method is bounded and its limit points are critical points. Under the powerful Kurdyka-{Łojasiewicz} properties we prove that the sequence has a finite length thus converges, and we drive its convergence rates.
In this paper, we describe and establish iteration-complexity of two accelerated composite gradient (ACG) variants to solve a smooth nonconvex composite optimization problem whose objective function is the sum of a nonconvex differentiable function $ f $ with a Lipschitz continuous gradient and a simple nonsmooth closed convex function $ h $. When $f$ is convex, the first ACG variant reduces to the well-known FISTA for a specific choice of the input, and hence the first one can be viewed as a natural extension of the latter one to the nonconvex setting. The first variant requires an input pair…
In this paper, we study the proximal incremental aggregated gradient(PIAG) algorithm for minimizing the sum of L-smooth nonconvex component functions and a proper closed convex function. By exploiting the L-smooth property and with the help of an error bound condition, we can show that the PIAG method still enjoys some nice linear convergence properties even for nonconvex minimization. To illustrate this, we first demonstrate that the generated sequence globally converges to the stationary point set. Then, there exists a threshold such that the objective function value sequence and the iterate…
This paper aims to develop a Newton-type method to solve a class of nonconvex composite programs. In particular, the nonsmooth part is possibly nonconvex. To tackle the nonconvexity, we develop a notion of strong prox-regularity which is related to the singleton property, Lipschitz continuity, and monotonicity of the associated proximal operator, and we verify it in various classes of functions, including weakly convex functions, indicator functions of proximally smooth sets, and two specific sphere-related nonconvex nonsmooth functions. In this case, the problem class we are concerned with co…
This paper proposes an efficient adaptive variant of a quadratic penalty accelerated inexact proximal point (QP-AIPP) method proposed earlier by the authors. Both the QP-AIPP method and its variant solve linearly set constrained nonconvex composite optimization problems using a quadratic penalty approach where the generated penalized subproblems are solved by a variant of the underlying AIPP method. The variant, in turn, solves a given penalized subproblem by generating a sequence of proximal subproblems which are then solved by an accelerated composite gradient algorithm. The main difference …
We tackle highly nonconvex, nonsmooth composite optimization problems whose objectives comprise a Moreau-Yosida regularized term. Classical nonconvex proximal splitting algorithms, such as nonconvex ADMM, suffer from lack of convergence for such a problem class. To overcome this difficulty, in this work we consider a lifted variant of the Moreau-Yosida regularized model and propose a novel multiblock primal-dual algorithm that intrinsically stabilizes the dual block. We provide a complete convergence analysis of our algorithm and identify respective optimality qualifications under which statio…
It is well-known that the lower bound of iteration complexity for solving nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems is $Ω(1/ε^2)$, which can be achieved by standard gradient descent algorithm when the objective function is smooth. This lower bound still holds for nonconvex constrained problems, while it is still unknown whether a first-order method can achieve this lower bound. In this paper, we show that a simple single-loop first-order algorithm called smoothed proximal augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) can achieve such iteration complexity lower bound. The key technical contribution is …
In this paper we propose a proximal algorithm for minimizing an objective function of two block variables consisting of three terms: 1) a smooth function, 2) a nonsmooth function which is a composition between a strictly increasing, concave, differentiable function and a convex nonsmooth function, and 3) a smooth function which couples the two block variables. We propose a variable metric composite proximal alternating linearized minimization (CPALM) to solve this class of problems. Building on the powerful Kurdyka-Łojasiewicz property, we derive the convergence analysis and establish that eac…
We first propose a decentralized proximal stochastic gradient tracking method (DProxSGT) for nonconvex stochastic composite problems, with data heterogeneously distributed on multiple workers in a decentralized connected network. To save communication cost, we then extend DProxSGT to a compressed method by compressing the communicated information. Both methods need only $\mathcal{O}(1)$ samples per worker for each proximal update, which is important to achieve good generalization performance on training deep neural networks. With a smoothness condition on the expected loss function (but not on…
This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite smooth approximations of the original problems. More specifically, in the unconstrained (resp. constrained) case, approximate stationary points of the original problem are obtained by applying, to its composite smooth approximation, an accelerated inexact proximal point (resp. quadratic penalty) method presented in a previous paper by the authors. Iteration com…
In this paper we study the problems of minimizing the sum of two nonconvex functions: one is differentiable and satisfies smooth adaptable property. The smooth adaptable property, also named relatively smooth condition, is weaker than the globally gradient Lipschitz continuity. We analyze an inertial version of the Bregman Proximal Gradient (BPG) algorithm and prove its stationary convergence. Besides, we prove a sublinear convergence of the inertial algorithm. Moreover, if the objective function satisfies Kurdyka--Łojasiewicz (KL) property, its global convergence to a critical point of the ob…
In this paper we study nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems with semi-algebraic data, where the variables vector is split into several blocks of variables. The problem consists of one smooth function of the entire variables vector and the sum of nonsmooth functions for each block separately. We analyze an inertial version of the Proximal Alternating Linearized Minimization (PALM) algorithm and prove its global convergence to a critical point of the objective function at hand. We illustrate our theoretical findings by presenting numerical experiments on blind image deconvolution, on sp…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives. This paper presents convergence results for the stochastic proximal gradient method applied to Hilbert spaces, motivated by optimization problems with partial differential equation (PDE) constraints with random inputs and coefficients. We study stochastic algorithms for nonconvex and nonsmooth problems, where the nonsmooth part is convex and the nonconvex par…
We introduce the concept of strong high-order approximate minimizers for nonconvex optimization problems. These apply in both standard smooth and composite non-smooth settings, and additionally allow convex or inexpensive constraints. An adaptive regularization algorithm is then proposed to find such approximate minimizers. Under suitable Lipschitz continuity assumptions, whenever the feasible set is convex, it is shown that using a model of degree $p$, this algorithm will find a strong approximate q-th-order minimizer in at most ${\cal O}\left(\max_{1\leq j\leq q}ε_j^{-(p+1)/(p-j+1)}\right)$ …
This paper considers a class of constrained stochastic composite optimization problems whose objective function is given by the summation of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) component, together with a certain non-differentiable (but convex) component. In order to solve these problems, we propose a randomized stochastic projected gradient (RSPG) algorithm, in which proper mini-batch of samples are taken at each iteration depending on the total budget of stochastic samples allowed. The RSPG algorithm also employs a general distance function to allow taking advantage of the geometry of the f…
We study (constrained) nonconvex (composite) optimization problems where the decision variables vector can be split into blocks of variables. Random block projection is a popular technique to handle this kind of problem for its remarkable reduction of the computational cost from the projection. However, this powerful method has not been proposed for the situation that first-order information is prohibited and only zeroth-order information is available. In this paper, we propose to develop different classes of zeroth-order stochastic block coordinate type methods. Zeroth-order block coordinate …
This paper proposes and analyzes a dampened proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (DP.ADMM) for solving linearly-constrained nonconvex optimization problems where the smooth part of the objective function is nonseparable. Each iteration of DP.ADMM consists of: (i) a sequence of partial proximal augmented Lagrangian (AL) updates, (ii) an under-relaxed Lagrange multiplier update, and (iii) a novel test to check whether the penalty parameter of the AL function should be updated. Under a basic Slater condition and some requirements related to the dampening factor and under-relaxatio…
We analyze worst-case complexity of a Proximal augmented Lagrangian (Proximal AL) framework for nonconvex optimization with nonlinear equality constraints. When an approximate first-order (second-order) optimal point is obtained in the subproblem, an $ε$ first-order (second-order) optimal point for the original problem can be guaranteed within $\mathcal{O}(1/ ε^{2 - η})$ outer iterations (where $η$ is a user-defined parameter with $η\in[0,2]$ for the first-order result and $η\in [1,2]$ for the second-order result) when the proximal term coefficient $β$ and penalty parameter $ρ$ satisfy $β= \ma…
We develop a new variational approach on level sets aiming towards convergence rate analysis of a variable Bregman proximal gradient (VBPG) method for a broad class of nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems. With this new approach, we are able to extend the concepts of Bregman proximal mapping and their corresponding Bregman proximal envelops, Bregman proximal gap function to nonconvex setting. Properties of these mappings and functions are examined. An aim of this work is to provide a solid foundation on which further design and analysis of VBPG for more general nonconvex optimization …
