The Frank-Wolfe method solves smooth constrained convex optimization problems at a generic sublinear rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$, and it (or its variants) enjoys accelerated convergence rates for two fundamental classes of constraints: polytopes and strongly-convex sets. Uniformly convex sets non-trivially subsume strongly convex sets and form a large variety of \textit{curved} convex sets commonly encountered in machine learning and signal processing. For instance, the $\ell_p$-balls are uniformly convex for all $p > 1$, but strongly convex for $p\in]1,2]$ only. We show that these sets systematically induce accelerated convergence rates for the original Frank-Wolfe algorithm, which continuously interpolate between known rates. Our accelerated convergence rates emphasize that it is the curvature of the constraint sets -- not just their strong convexity -- that leads to accelerated convergence rates. These results also importantly highlight that the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is adaptive to much more generic constraint set structures, thus explaining faster empirical convergence. Finally, we also show accelerated convergence rates when the set is only locally uniformly convex and provide similar results in online linear optimization.
This note conducts a comparative study of some approximating properties of the metric projection, generalized projection, and generalized metric projection in uniformly convex and uniformly smooth Banach spaces. We prove that the inverse images of the metric projections are closed and convex cones, but they are not necessarily convex. In contrast, inverse images of the generalized projection are closed and convex cones. Furthermore, the inverse images of the generalized metric projection are neither a convex set nor a cone. We also prove that the distance from a point to its projection at a co…
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 paper, we study the iteration complexity of cubic regularization of Newton method for solving composite minimization problems with uniformly convex objective. We introduce the notion of second-order condition number of a certain degree and justify the linear rate of convergence in a nondegenerate case for the method with an adaptive estimate of the regularization parameter. The algorithm automatically achieves the best possible global complexity bound among different problem classes of uniformly convex objective functions with Hölder continuous Hessian of the smooth part of the objecti…
In this paper, acceleration of gradient methods for convex optimization problems with weak levels of convexity and smoothness is considered. Starting from the universal fast gradient method which was designed to be an optimal method for weakly smooth problems whose gradients are Hölder continuous, its momentum is modified appropriately so that it can also accommodate uniformly convex and weakly smooth problems. Different from the existing works, fast gradient methods proposed in this paper do not use the restarting technique but use momentums that are suitably designed to reflect both the unif…
In this paper we consider a problem, called convex projection, of projecting a convex set onto a subspace. We will show that to a convex projection one can assign a particular multi-objective convex optimization problem, such that the solution to that problem also solves the convex projection (and vice versa), which is analogous to the result in the polyhedral convex case considered in arXiv:1507.00228. In practice, however, one can only compute approximate solutions in the (bounded or self-bounded) convex case, which solve the problem up to a given error tolerance. We will show that for appro…
A remarkable example of a nonempty closed convex set in the Euclidean plane for which the directional derivative of the metric projection mapping fails to exist was constructed by A. Shapiro. In this paper, we revisit and modify that construction to obtain a convex set with smooth boundary which possesses the same property.
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.
We propose a generalization of the method of cyclic projections, which uses the lengths of projection steps carried out in the past to learn about the geometry of the problem and decides on this basis which projections to carry out in the future. We prove the convergence of this algorithm and illustrate its behavior in a first numerical study.
The main problem considered in the present paper is to single out classes of convex sets, whose convexity property is preserved under nonlinear smooth transformations. Extending an approach due to B.T. Polyak, the present study focusses on the class of uniformly convex subsets of Banach spaces. As a main result, a quantitative condition linking the modulus of convexity of such kind of set, the regularity behaviour around a point of a nonlinear mapping and the Lipschitz continuity of its derivative is established, which ensures the images of uniformly convex sets to remain uniformly convex. App…
Finding a point in the intersection of a collection of closed convex sets, that is the convex feasibility problem, represents the main modeling strategy for many computational problems. In this paper we analyze new stochastic reformulations of the convex feasibility problem in order to facilitate the development of new algorithmic schemes. We also analyze the conditioning problem parameters using certain (linear) regularity assumptions on the individual convex sets. Then, we introduce a general random projection algorithmic framework, which extends to the random settings many existing projecti…
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.
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…
This paper is devoted to the general problem of projection onto a polyhedral convex cone generated by a finite set of generators.This problem is reformulated into projection onto the polytope obtained by simple truncation of the original cone. Then it can be solved with just two closely related projections onto the same bounded polytope. This approach's computational performance is conditioned by the crucial tool's efficiency for solving the fundamental problem of finding the least norm element in a convex hull of a given finite set of points. In our numerical experiments, we used for this pur…
We show that the minimum distance projection in the L1-norm from an interior point onto the boundary of a convex set is achieved by a single, unidimensional projection. Application of this characterization when the convex set is a polyhedron leads to either an elementary minmax problem or a set of easily solved linear programs, depending upon whether the polyhedron is given as the intersection of a set of half spaces or as the convex hull of a set of extreme points. The outcome is an easier and more straightforward derivation of the special case results given in a recent paper by Briec.
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.
Two new optimization techniques based on projections onto convex space (POCS) framework for solving convex and some non-convex optimization problems are presented. The dimension of the minimization problem is lifted by one and sets corresponding to the cost function are defined. If the cost function is a convex function in R^N the corresponding set is a convex set in R^(N+1). The iterative optimization approach starts with an arbitrary initial estimate in R^(N+1) and an orthogonal projection is performed onto one of the sets in a sequential manner at each step of the optimization problem. The …
This paper considers a conceptual version of a convex optimization algorithm whic is based on replacing a convex optimization problem with the root-finding problem for the approximate sub-differential mapping which is solved by repeated projection onto the epigraph of conjugate function. Whilst the projection problem is not exactly solvable in finite space-time it can be approximately solved up to arbitrary precision by simple iterative methods, which use linear support functions of the epigraph. It seems therefore useful to study computational characteristics of the idealized version of this …
The basic tool for solving problems in metric geometry and isotonic regression is the metric projection onto closed convex cones. Isotonicity of these projections with respect to a given order relation can facilitate finding the solutions of the above problems. In the recent note "A. B. Németh and S.Z. Németh: Isotonic regression and isotonic projection. Linear Algebra and its Applications, 494: 80-89 (2016)" this problem was studied for the coordinate-wise ordering. This study was the starting point for further investigations, such as the ones presented here. The order relation in the Euclide…
The Euclidean projection onto a convex set is an important problem that arises in numerous constrained optimization tasks. Unfortunately, in many cases, computing projections is computationally demanding. In this work, we focus on projection problems where the constraints are smooth and the number of constraints is significantly smaller than the dimension. The runtime of existing approaches to solving such problems is either cubic in the dimension or polynomial in the inverse of the target accuracy. Conversely, we propose a simple and efficient primal-dual approach, with a runtime that scales …
In this paper we present a new algorithmic realization of a projection-based scheme for general convex constrained optimization problem. The general idea is to transform the original optimization problem to a sequence of feasibility problems by iteratively constraining the objective function from above until the feasibility problem is inconsistent. For each of the feasibility problems one may apply any of the existing projection methods for solving it. In particular, the scheme allows the use of subgradient projections and does not require exact projections onto the constraints sets as in exis…
The task of projecting onto $\ell_p$ norm balls is ubiquitous in statistics and machine learning, yet the availability of actionable algorithms for doing so is largely limited to the special cases of $p = \left\{ 0, 1,2, \infty \right\}$. In this paper, we introduce novel, scalable methods for projecting onto the $\ell_p$ ball for general $p>0$. For $p \geq1 $, we solve the univariate Lagrangian dual via a dual Newton method. We then carefully design a bisection approach for $p<1$, presenting theoretical and empirical evidence of zero or a small duality gap in the non-convex case. The success …
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…
It is well known in convex analysis that proximal mappings on Hilbert spaces are $1$-Lipschitz. In the present paper we show that proximal mappings on uniformly convex Banach spaces are uniformly continuous on bounded sets. Moreover, we introduce a new general proximal mapping whose regularization term is given as a composition of a Young function and the norm, and formulate our results at this level of generality. It is our aim to obtain the corresponding modulus of uniform continuity explicitly in terms of a modulus of uniform convexity of the norm and of moduli witnessing properties of the …
We provide a unifying interpretation of various optimal transport problems as a minimisation of a linear functional over the set of all Choquet representations of a given pair of probability measures ordered with respect to a certain convex cone of functions. This allows us to provide novel proofs of duality formulae. Among our tools is Strassen's theorem. We provide new formulations of the primal and the dual problem for martingale optimal transport employing a novel representation of the set of extreme points of probability measures in convex order on Euclidean space. We exhibit a link to un…
This paper considers projection and convolution operations for integrally convex functions, which constitute a fundamental function class in discrete convex analysis. It is shown that the class of integrally convex functions is stable under projection, and this is also the case with the subclasses of integrally convex functions satisfying local or global discrete midpoint convexity. As is known in the literature, the convolution of two integrally convex functions may possibly fail to be integrally convex. We show that the convolution of an integrally convex function with a separable convex fun…
This article studies optional and predictable projections of integrands and convex-valued stochastic processes. The existence and uniqueness are shown under general conditions that are analogous to those for conditional expectations of integrands and random sets. In the convex case, duality correspondences between the projections and projections of epigraphs are given. These results are used to study projections of set-valued integrands. Consistently with the general theory of stochastic processes, projections are not constructed using reference measures on the optional and predictable sigma-a…
Corrigendum to "Applications of Strassen's theorem and Choquet theory to optimal transport problems, to uniformly convex functions and to uniformly smooth functions"
A spectrahedron is a set defined by a linear matrix inequality. A projection of a spectrahedron is often called a semidefinitely representable set. We show that the convex hull of a finite union of such projections is again a projection of a spectrahedron. This improves upon the result of Helton and Nie, who prove the same result in the case of bounded sets.
Linear bandit algorithms yield $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(n\sqrt{T})$ pseudo-regret bounds on compact convex action sets $\mathcal{K}\subset\mathbb{R}^n$ and two types of structural assumptions lead to better pseudo-regret bounds. When $\mathcal{K}$ is the simplex or an $\ell_p$ ball with $p\in]1,2]$, there exist bandits algorithms with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{nT})$ pseudo-regret bounds. Here, we derive bandit algorithms for some strongly convex sets beyond $\ell_p$ balls that enjoy pseudo-regret bounds of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{nT})$, which answers an open question from [BCB12, §5.5.]. Inter…
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search step (gradient descent or Quasi-Newton iteration) into these uniformly optimal convex programming methods, and then enforce a monotone decreasing property of the function values computed along the trajectory. Algorithms of these types will then achieve the best known complexity for nonconvex problems, and the optimal complexity for convex ones without requiring…
In this paper, we study the rate of convergence of the cyclic projection algorithm applied to finitely many basic semi-algebraic convex sets. We establish an explicit convergence rate estimate which relies on the maximum degree of the polynomials that generate the basic semi-algebraic convex sets and the dimension of the underlying space. We achieve our results by exploiting the algebraic structure of the basic semi-algebraic convex sets.
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
Projection-free optimization algorithms, which are mostly based on the classical Frank-Wolfe method, have gained significant interest in the machine learning community in recent years due to their ability to handle convex constraints that are popular in many applications, but for which computing projections is often computationally impractical in high-dimensional settings, and hence prohibit the use of most standard projection-based methods. In particular, a significant research effort was put on projection-free methods for online learning. In this paper we revisit the Online Frank-Wolfe (OFW)…
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel primal-dual inexact gradient projection method for nonlinear optimization problems with convex-set constraint. This method only needs inexact computation of the projections onto the convex set for each iteration, consequently reducing the computational cost for projections per iteration. This feature is attractive especially for solving problems where the projections are computationally not easy to calculate. Global convergence guarantee and O(1/k) ergodic convergence rate of the optimality residual are provided under loose assumptions. We apply our proposed s…
A new deconvolution algorithm based on orthogonal projections onto the epigraph set of a convex cost function is presented. In this algorithm, the dimension of the minimization problem is lifted by one and sets corresponding to the cost function are defined. As the utilized cost function is a convex function in $R^N$, the corresponding epigraph set is also a convex set in $R^{N+1}$. The deconvolution algorithm starts with an arbitrary initial estimate in $R^{N+1}$. At each step of the iterative algorithm, first deconvolution projections are performed onto the epigraphs, later an orthogonal pro…
Bilkent University（比尔肯特大学）；Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center（纪念斯隆·凯特琳癌症中心）
A new signal processing framework based on making orthogonal Projections onto the Epigraph Set of a Convex cost function (PESC) is developed. In this way it is possible to solve convex optimization problems using the well-known Projections onto Convex Set (POCS) approach. In this algorithm, the dimension of the minimization problem is lifted by one and a convex set corresponding to the epigraph of the cost function is defined. If the cost function is a convex function in $R^N$, the corresponding epigraph set is also a convex set in R^{N+1}. The PESC method provides globally optimal solutions f…
Two new optimization techniques based on projections onto convex space (POCS) framework for solving convex optimization problems are presented. The dimension of the minimization problem is lifted by one and sets corresponding to the cost function are defined. If the cost function is a convex function in R^N the corresponding set is also a convex set in R^{N+1}. The iterative optimization approach starts with an arbitrary initial estimate in R^{N+1} and an orthogonal projection is performed onto one of the sets in a sequential manner at each step of the optimization problem. The method provides…
Convex optimizers have known many applications as differentiable layers within deep neural architectures. One application of these convex layers is to project points into a convex set. However, both forward and backward passes of these convex layers are significantly more expensive to compute than those of a typical neural network. We investigate in this paper whether an inexact, but cheaper projection, can drive a descent algorithm to an optimum. Specifically, we propose an interpolation-based projection that is computationally cheap and easy to compute given a convex, domain defining, functi…
As a projection-free algorithm, Frank-Wolfe (FW) method, also known as conditional gradient, has recently received considerable attention in the machine learning community. In this dissertation, we study several topics on the FW variants for scalable projection-free optimization. We first propose 1-SFW, the first projection-free method that requires only one sample per iteration to update the optimization variable and yet achieves the best known complexity bounds for convex, non-convex, and monotone DR-submodular settings. Then we move forward to the distributed setting, and develop Quantized …
We prove that for any compact set B in R^d and for any epsilon >0 there is a finite subset X of B of |X|=d^{O(1/epsilon^2)} points such that the maximum absolute value of any linear function ell: R^d --> R on X approximates the maximum absolute value of ell on B within a factor of epsilon sqrt{d}. We also discuss approximations of convex bodies by projections of spectrahedra, that is, by projections of sections of the cone of positive semidefinite matrices by affine subspaces.
Yale Institute for Network Science（耶鲁网络科学研究所）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
In this paper, we propose the first computationally efficient projection-free algorithm for bandit convex optimization (BCO). We show that our algorithm achieves a sublinear regret of $O(nT^{4/5})$ (where $T$ is the horizon and $n$ is the dimension) for any bounded convex functions with uniformly bounded gradients. We also evaluate the performance of our algorithm against baselines on both synthetic and real data sets for quadratic programming, portfolio selection and matrix completion problems.
University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)（香港中文大学（深圳））
In this paper, we study a family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth inf-projection minimization problems, where the target objective function is equal to minimization of a joint function over another variable. This problem include difference of convex (DC) functions and a family of bi-convex functions as special cases. We develop stochastic algorithms and establish their first-order convergence for finding a (nearly) stationary solution of the target non-convex function under different conditions of the component functions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that comprehen…
Our study focuses on determining the best weight windows for a weighted moving average smoother under squared loss. We show that there exists an optimal weight window that is symmetrical around its center. We study the class of tapered weight windows, which decrease in weight as they move away from the center. We formulate the corresponding least squares problem as a quadratic program and finally as a projection of the origin onto a convex polytope. Additionally, we provide some analytical solutions to the best window when some conditions are met on the input data.
