We show that the primal-dual gradient method, also known as the gradient descent ascent method, for solving convex-concave minimax problems can be viewed as an inexact gradient method applied to the primal problem. The gradient, whose exact computation relies on solving the inner maximization problem, is computed approximately by another gradient method. To model the approximate computational routine implemented by iterative algorithms, we introduce the notion of dynamic inexact oracles, which are discrete-time dynamical systems whose output asymptotically approaches the output of an exact oracle. We present a unified convergence analysis for dynamic inexact oracles realized by general first-order methods and demonstrate its use in creating new accelerated primal-dual algorithms.
In this paper we introduce new methods for convex optimization problems with inexact stochastic oracle. First method is an extension of the intermediate gradient method proposed by Devolder, Glineur and Nesterov for problems with inexact oracle. Our new method can be applied to the problems with composite structure, stochastic inexact oracle and allows using non-Euclidean setup. We prove estimates for mean rate of convergence and probabilities of large deviations from this rate. Also we introduce two modifications of this method for strongly convex problems. For the first modification we prove…
In the paper we consider one point and two point multiarmed bamdit problems. In other words we consider the online stochastic convex optimization problems with oracle that return the value (realization) of the function at one point or at two points. We allow these values to be inexact, but the level of noise should be small enough. We generalize well known results for inexact oracle case. And we also generalize classical results to prox-structures differ from euclidian.
In the paper we generalize universal gradient method (Yu. Nesterov) to strongly convex case and to Intermediate gradient method (Devolder-Glineur-Nesterov). We also consider possible generalizations to stochastic and online context. We show how these results can be generalized to gradient-free method and method of random direction search. But the main ingridient of this paper is assumption about the oracle. We considered the oracle to be inexact.
We introduce new global and local inexact oracle concepts for a wide class of convex functions in composite convex minimization. Such inexact oracles naturally come from primal-dual framework, barrier smoothing, inexact computations of gradients and Hessian, and many other situations. We also provide examples showing that the class of convex functions equipped with the newly inexact second-order oracles is larger than standard self-concordant as well as Lipschitz gradient function classes. Further, we investigate several properties of convex and/or self-concordant functions under the inexact s…
We develop a new inexact interior-point Lagrangian decomposition method to solve a wide range class of constrained composite convex optimization problems. Our method relies on four techniques: Lagrangian dual decomposition, self-concordant barrier smoothing, path-following, and proximal-Newton technique. It also allows one to approximately compute the solution of the primal subproblems (called the slave problems), which leads to inexact oracles (i.e., inexact gradients and Hessians) of the smoothed dual problem (called the master problem). The smoothed dual problem is nonsmooth, we propose to …
This is a short summary of already published results on accelerated first and zero-order optimization methods, as well as accelerated methods for problems with linear constraints. This short summary is a requirement for obtaining a degree of doctor of sciences in Russian Federation. The details can be found in the papers listed in the introduction.
In this paper, we develop new first-order method for composite non-convex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of "`hard"', possibly non-convex part, and "`simple"' convex part. Informally speaking, oracle inexactness means that, for the "`hard"' part, at any point we can approximately calculate the value of the function and construct a quadratic function, which approximately bounds this function from above. We give several examples of such inexactness: smooth non-convex functions with inexact Hölder-continuous gradient, fun…
In this paper we propose a new efficient approach for numerical calculation of equillibriums in multistage transport problems. In the very core of our approach lies the proper combination of Universal Gradient Method proposed by Yu. Nesterov (2013) and conception of inexact oracle (Devolder--Glineur--Nesterov, 2011). In particular our technique allows us to calculate Wasserstein's Barycenter in a fast manner (this results generalized M. Cuturi et al. (2014)).
In the paper we show that euclidian randomization in some situations (i.e. for gradient-free method on a simplex) can be as good as the randomization on the unit sphere in 1-norm. That is on the simplex example we show that for gradient-free methods the choise of the prox-structure and the choise of a way of randomization have to be connected to each other. We demonstrate how it can be done in an optimal way. It is important that we consider inexact oracle.
We introduce an inexact oracle model for variational inequalities (VI) with monotone operator, propose a numerical method which solves such VI's and analyze its convergence rate. As a particular case, we consider VI's with Hölder-continuous operator and show that our algorithm is universal. This means that without knowing the Hölder parameter $ν$ and Hölder constant $L_ν$ it has the best possible complexity for this class of VI's, namely our algorithm has complexity $O\left( \inf_{ν\in[0,1]}\left(\frac{L_ν}{\varepsilon} \right)^{\frac{2}{1+ν}}R^2 \right)$, where $R$ is the size of the feasible…
Optimal Convex Optimization with Inexact Second-Order Oracles
IIIS, Tsinghua University（清华大学交叉信息研究院）；Department of Artificial Intelligence, Westlake University（西湖大学人工智能学院）；School of Data Science, Fudan University（复旦大学数据科学系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学计算机科学与工程学系）
In this paper, we consider two types of problems that have some similarity in their structure, namely, min-min problems and min-max saddle-point problems. Our approach is based on considering the outer minimization problem as a minimization problem with inexact oracle. This inexact oracle is calculated via inexact solution of the inner problem, which is either minimization or a maximization problem. Our main assumptions are that the problem is smooth and the available oracle is mixed: it is only possible to evaluate the gradient w.r.t. the outer block of variables which corresponds to the oute…
In this paper, we propose new first-order methods for minimization of a convex function on a simple convex set. We assume that the objective function is a composite function given as a sum of a simple convex function and a convex function with inexact Hölder-continuous subgradient. We propose Universal Intermediate Gradient Method. Our method enjoys both the universality and intermediateness properties. Following the paper by Y. Nesterov (Math.Prog., 2015) on Universal Gradient Methods, our method does not require any information about the Hölder parameter and constant and adjusts itself autom…
In this paper, we study the distributed optimization problem using approximate first-order information. We suppose the agent can repeatedly call an inexact first-order oracle of each individual objective function and exchange information with its time-varying neighbors. We revisit the distributed subgradient method in this circumstance and show its suboptimality under square summable but not summable step sizes. We also present several conditions on the inexactness of the local oracles to ensure an exact convergence of the iterative sequences towards the global optimal solution. A numerical ex…
This paper expands the Cyclic Block Proximal Gradient method for block separable composite minimization by allowing for inexactly computed gradients and proximal maps. The resultant algorithm, the Inexact Cyclic Block Proximal Gradient (I-CBPG) method, shares the same convergence rate as its exactly computed analogue provided the allowable errors decrease sufficiently quickly or are pre-selected to be sufficiently small. We provide numerical experiments that showcase the practical computational advantage of I-CBPG for certain fixed tolerances of approximation error and for a dynamically decrea…
It is well-known that accelerated gradient first-order methods possess optimal complexity estimates for the class of convex smooth minimization problems. In many practical situations it makes sense to work with inexact gradient information. However, this can lead to an accumulation of corresponding inexactness in the theoretical estimates of the rate of convergence. We propose some modification of the Sequential Subspace Optimization Method (SESOP) for minimization problems with quasar-convex functions with inexact gradient. A theoretical result is obtained indicating the absence of accumulati…
The purpose of this paper is to present an inexact version of the scaled gradient projection method on a convex set, which is inexact in two sense. First, an inexact projection on the feasible set is computed, allowing for an appropriate relative error tolerance. Second, an inexact non-monotone line search scheme is employed to compute a step size which defines the next iteration. It is shown that the proposed method has similar asymptotic convergence properties and iteration-complexity bounds as the usual scaled gradient projection method employing monotone line searches.
A gradient projection method with feasible inexact projections is proposed in the present paper. The inexact projection is performed using a relative error tolerance. Asymptotic convergence analysis and iteration-complexity bounds of the method employing constant and Armijo step sizes are presented. Numerical results are reported illustrating the potential advantages of considering inexact projections instead of exact ones in some medium scale instances of a least squares problem over the spectrohedron.
The $\ell_p$ regularization problem with $0< p< 1$ has been widely studied for finding sparse solutions of linear inverse problems and gained successful applications in various mathematics and applied science fields. The proximal gradient algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms for solving the $\ell_p$ regularisation problem. In the present paper, we investigate the linear convergence issue of one inexact descent method and two inexact proximal gradient algorithms (PGA). For this purpose, an optimality condition theorem is explored to provide the equivalences among a local minimum, sec…
In this paper, we propose a new way to obtain optimal convergence rates for smooth stochastic (strong) convex optimization tasks. Our approach is based on results for optimization tasks where gradients have nonrandom noise. In contrast to previously known results, we extend our idea to the inexact model conception.
Gradient sampling (GS) has proved to be an effective methodology for the minimization of objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The most computationally expensive component of a contemporary GS method is the need to solve a convex quadratic subproblem in each iteration. In this paper, a strategy is proposed that allows the use of inexact solutions of these subproblems, which, as proved in the paper, can be incorporated without the loss of theoretical convergence guarantees. Numerical experiments show that by exploiting inexact subproblem solutions, one can consistently red…
A unified framework for inexact adaptive stepsizes in the gradient methods, the conjugate gradient methods and the quasi-Newton methods for strictly convex quadratic optimization
On Some Versions of Subspace Optimization Methods with Inexact Gradient Information
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Innopolis University（因诺波利斯大学人工智能研究中心）；National Research University Higher School of Economics（国立高等经济大学）；V. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University（V.维尔纳茨基克里米亚联邦大学）
We study the computational complexity certification of inexact gradient augmented Lagrangian methods for solving convex optimization problems with complicated constraints. We solve the augmented Lagrangian dual problem that arises from the relaxation of complicating constraints with gradient and fast gradient methods based on inexact first order information. Moreover, since the exact solution of the augmented Lagrangian primal problem is hard to compute in practice, we solve this problem up to some given inner accuracy. We derive relations between the inner and the outer accuracy of the primal…
This paper proposes and develops new linesearch methods with inexact gradient information for finding stationary points of nonconvex continuously differentiable functions on finite-dimensional spaces. Some abstract convergence results for a broad class of linesearch methods are stablished. A general scheme for inexact reduced gradient (IRG) methods is proposed, where the errors in the gradient approximation automatically adapt with the magnitudes of the exact gradients. The sequences of iterations are shown to obtain stationary accumulation points when different stepsize selections are employe…
We consider optimization methods for convex minimization problems under inexact information on the objective function. We introduce inexact model of the objective, which as a particular cases includes $(δ,L)$ inexact oracle and relative smoothness condition. We analyze gradient method which uses this inexact model and obtain convergence rates for convex and strongly convex problems. To show potential applications of our general framework we consider three particular problems. The first one is clustering by electorial model introduced in [Nesterov, 2018]. The second one is approximating optimal…
In this paper, we propose a globally convergent method for solving constrained nonlinear systems. The method combines an efficient Newton conditional gradient method with a derivative-free and nonmonotone linesearch strategy. The global convergence analysis of the proposed method is established under suitable conditions, and some preliminary numerical experiments are given to illustrate its performance.
One of the most popular and important first-order iterations that provides optimal complexity of the classical proximal gradient method (PGM) is the "Fast Iterative Shrinkage/Thresholding Algorithm" (FISTA). In this paper, two inexact versions of FISTA for minimizing the sum of two convex functions are studied. The proposed schemes inexactly solve their subproblems by using relative error criteria instead of exogenous and diminishing error rules. When the evaluation of the proximal operator is difficult, inexact versions of FISTA are necessary and the relative error rules proposed here may hav…
In this paper we analyze several inexact fast augmented Lagrangian methods for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems. Mainly, our methods rely on the combination of excessive-gap-like smoothing technique developed in [15] and the newly introduced inexact oracle framework from [4]. We analyze several algorithmic instances with constant and adaptive smoothing parameters and derive total computational complexity results in terms of projections onto a simple primal set. For the basic inexact fast augmented Lagrangian algorithm we obtain the overall computational complexity of o…
In this paper, we propose an inexact Newton-like conditional gradient method for solving constrained systems of nonlinear equations. The local convergence of the new method as well as results on its rate are established by using a general majorant condition. Two applications of such condition are provided: one is for functions whose the derivative satisfies Holder-like condition and the other is for functions that satisfies a Smale condition, which includes a substantial class of analytic functions. Some preliminaries numerical experiments illustrating the applicability of the proposed method …
We propose a practical inexact augmented Lagrangian method (iALM) for nonconvex problems with nonlinear constraints. We characterize the total computational complexity of our method subject to a verifiable geometric condition, which is closely related to the Polyak-Lojasiewicz and Mangasarian-Fromowitz conditions. In particular, when a first-order solver is used for the inner iterates, we prove that iALM finds a first-order stationary point with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/ε^4)$ calls to the first-order oracle. If, in addition, the problem is smooth and a second-order solver is used for the inner i…
This paper is focused on a stochastic quasi-variational inequality (SQVI) problem with a continuous and strongly-monotone mapping over a closed and convex set where the projection onto the constraint set may not be easy to compute. We present an inexact variance reduced stochastic scheme to solve SQVI problems and analyzed its convergence rate and oracle complexity. A linear rate of convergence is obtained by progressively increasing sample-size and approximating the projection operator. Moreover, we show how a competition among blood donation organizations can be modeled as an SQVI and we pro…
In this paper, we develop a unified framework for analyzing the tracking error and dynamic regret of inexact online optimization methods under a variety of settings. Specifically, we leverage the quadratic constraint approach from control theory to formulate sequential semidefinite programs (SDPs) whose feasible points naturally correspond to tracking error bounds of various inexact online optimization methods including the inexact online gradient descent (OGD) method, the online gradient descent-ascent method, the online stochastic gradient method, and the inexact proximal online gradient met…
We propose several adaptive algorithmic methods for problems of non-smooth convex optimization. The first of them is based on a special artificial inexactness. Namely, the concept of inexact ($ δ, Δ, L$)-model of objective functional in optimization is introduced and some gradient-type methods with adaptation of inexactness parameters are proposed. A similar concept of an inexact model is introduced for variational inequalities as well as for saddle point problems. Analogues of switching sub-gradient schemes are proposed for convex programming problems with some general assumptions.
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…
