Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank-Wolfe (FW) method has become one of the cornerstones in large scale optimization for machine learning and computational statistics. Numerous applications within these fields involve the minimization of functions with self-concordance like properties. Such generalized self-concordant (GSC) functions do not necessarily feature a Lipschitz continuous gradient, nor are they strongly convex. Indeed, in a number of applications, e.g. inverse covariance estimation or distance-weighted discrimination problems in support vector machines, the loss is given by a GSC function having unbounded curvature, implying absence of theoretical guarantees for the existing FW methods. This paper closes this apparent gap in the literature by developing provably convergent FW algorithms with standard O(1/k) convergence rate guarantees. If the problem formulation allows the efficient construction of a local linear minimization oracle, we develop a FW method with linear convergence rate.
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.
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.
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…
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.
We study the linear convergence of variants of the Frank-Wolfe algorithms for some classes of strongly convex problems, using only affine-invariant quantities. As in Guelat & Marcotte (1986), we show the linear convergence of the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm when the solution is in the interior of the domain, but with affine invariant constants. We also show the linear convergence of the away-steps variant of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, but with constants which only depend on the geometry of the domain, and not any property of the location of the optimal solution. Running these algorithms doe…
In this paper, we show that the Away-step Stochastic Frank-Wolfe Algorithm (ASFW) and Pairwise Stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm (PSFW) converge linearly in expectation. We also show that if an algorithm convergences linearly in expectation then it converges linearly almost surely. In order to prove these results, we develop a novel proof technique based on concepts of empirical processes and concentration inequalities. Such a technique has rarely been used to derive the convergence rates of stochastic optimization algorithms. In large-scale numerical experiments, ASFW and PSFW perform as well …
Frank-Wolfe Algorithms for (L0, L1)-smooth functions
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；Innopolis University（伊诺波利斯大学）；Adyghe State University（阿迪亚耶州立大学）；V. I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University（弗拉基米尔·伊万诺维奇·维尔纳茨基克里米亚联邦大学）
The analysis of Frank Wolfe (FW) variants is often complicated by the presence of different kinds of "good" and "bad" steps. In this article we aim to simplify the convergence analysis of some of these variants by getting rid of such a distinction between steps, and to improve existing rates by ensuring a sizable decrease of the objective at each iteration. In order to do this, we define the Short Step Chain (SSC) procedure, which skips gradient computations in consecutive short steps until proper stopping conditions are satisfied. This technique allows us to give a unified analysis and conver…
The stochastic Frank-Wolfe method has recently attracted much general interest in the context of optimization for statistical and machine learning due to its ability to work with a more general feasible region. However, there has been a complexity gap in the guaranteed convergence rate for stochastic Frank-Wolfe compared to its deterministic counterpart. In this work, we present a new generalized stochastic Frank-Wolfe method which closes this gap for the class of structured optimization problems encountered in statistical and machine learning characterized by empirical loss minimization with …
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm has regained much interest in its use in structurally constrained machine learning applications. However, one major limitation of the Frank-Wolfe algorithm is the slow local convergence property due to the zig-zagging behavior. We observe that this zig-zagging phenomenon can be viewed as an artifact of discretization, as when the method is viewed as an Euler discretization of a continuous time flow, that flow does not zig-zag. For this reason, we propose multistep Frank-Wolfe variants based on discretizations of the same flow whose truncation errors decay as $O(Δ^p)$,…
We propose a semi-stochastic Frank-Wolfe algorithm with away-steps for regularized empirical risk minimization and extend it to problems with block-coordinate structure. Our algorithms use adaptive step-size and we show that they converge linearly in expectation. The proposed algorithms can be applied to many important problems in statistics and machine learning including regularized generalized linear models, support vector machines and many others. In preliminary numerical tests on structural SVM and graph-guided fused LASSO, our algorithms outperform other competing algorithms in both itera…
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…
It is known that the Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm, which is affine-covariant, enjoys accelerated convergence rates when the constraint set is strongly convex. However, these results rely on norm-dependent assumptions, usually incurring non-affine invariant bounds, in contradiction with FW's affine-covariant property. In this work, we introduce new structural assumptions on the problem (such as the directional smoothness) and derive an affine invariant, norm-independent analysis of Frank-Wolfe. Based on our analysis, we propose an affine invariant backtracking line-search. Interestingly, we show …
We present and analyze a new generalized Frank-Wolfe method for the composite optimization problem $(P):{\min}_{x\in\mathbb{R}^n}\; f(\mathsf{A} x) + h(x)$, where $f$ is a $θ$-logarithmically-homogeneous self-concordant barrier, $\mathsf{A}$ is a linear operator and the function $h$ has bounded domain but is possibly non-smooth. We show that our generalized Frank-Wolfe method requires $O((δ_0 + θ+ R_h)\ln(δ_0) + (θ+ R_h)^2/\varepsilon)$ iterations to produce an $\varepsilon$-approximate solution, where $δ_0$ denotes the initial optimality gap and $R_h$ is the variation of $h$ on its domain. Th…
We present new results for the Frank-Wolfe method (also known as the conditional gradient method). We derive computational guarantees for arbitrary step-size sequences, which are then applied to various step-size rules, including simple averaging and constant step-sizes. We also develop step-size rules and computational guarantees that depend naturally on the warm-start quality of the initial (and subsequent) iterates. Our results include computational guarantees for both duality/bound gaps and the so-called FW gaps. Lastly, we present complexity bounds in the presence of approximate computati…
Conditional Gradient algorithms (aka Frank-Wolfe algorithms) form a classical set of methods for constrained smooth convex minimization due to their simplicity, the absence of projection steps, and competitive numerical performance. While the vanilla Frank-Wolfe algorithm only ensures a worst-case rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/ε)$, various recent results have shown that for strongly convex functions on polytopes, the method can be slightly modified to achieve linear convergence. However, this still leaves a huge gap between sublinear $\mathcal{O}(1/ε)$ convergence and linear $\mathcal{O}(\log 1/ε)$ c…
In this note we observe that for constrained convex minimization problems $\min_{x \in P}f(x)$ over a polytope $P$, dual prices for the linear program $\min_{z \in P} \nabla f(x) z$ obtained from linearization at approximately optimal solutions $x$ have a similar interpretation of rate of change in optimal value as for linear programming, providing a convex form of sensitivity analysis. This is of particular interest for Frank--Wolfe algorithms (also called conditional gradients), forming an important class of first-order methods, where a basic building block is linear minimization of gradient…
This paper is concerned with the Frank--Wolfe algorithm for a special class of {\it non-compact} constrained optimization problems. The notion of asymptotic cone is used to introduce this class of problems as well as to establish that the algorithm is well defined. These problems, with closed and convex constraint set, are characterized by two conditions on the gradient of the objective function. The first establishes that the gradient of the objective function is Lipschitz continuous, which is quite usual in the analysis of this algorithm. The second, which is new in this subject, establishes…
We present an exact algorithm for mean-risk optimization subject to a budget constraint, where decision variables may be continuous or integer. The risk is measured by the covariance matrix and weighted by an arbitrary monotone function, which allows to model risk-aversion in a very individual way. We address this class of convex mixed-integer minimization problems by designing a branch-and-bound algorithm, where at each node, the continuous relaxation is solved by a non-monotone Frank-Wolfe type algorithm with away-steps. Experimental results on portfolio optimization problems show that our a…
In this paper, we study active set identification results for the away-step Frank-Wolfe algorithm in different settings. We first prove a local identification property that we apply, in combination with a convergence hypothesis, to get an active set identification result. We then prove, in the nonconvex case, a novel $O(1/\sqrt{k})$ convergence rate result and active set identification for different stepsizes (under suitable assumptions on the set of stationary points). By exploiting those results, we also give explicit active set complexity bounds for both strongly convex and nonconvex object…
This paper considers distributed stochastic optimization, in which a number of agents cooperate to optimize a global objective function through local computations and information exchanges with neighbors over a network. Stochastic optimization problems are usually tackled by variants of projected stochastic gradient descent. However, projecting a point onto a feasible set is often expensive. The Frank-Wolfe (FW) method has well-documented merits in handling convex constraints, but existing stochastic FW algorithms are basically developed for centralized settings. In this context, the present w…
Structured constraints in Machine Learning have recently brought the Frank-Wolfe (FW) family of algorithms back in the spotlight. While the classical FW algorithm has poor local convergence properties, the Away-steps and Pairwise FW variants have emerged as improved variants with faster convergence. However, these improved variants suffer from two practical limitations: they require at each iteration to solve a 1-dimensional minimization problem to set the step-size and also require the Frank-Wolfe linear subproblems to be solved exactly. In this paper, we propose variants of Away-steps and Pa…
This paper considers distributed online convex constrained optimization, in which various agents in a multi-agent system cooperate to minimize a global cost function through communicating with neighbors over a time-varying network. When the constraint set of optimization problem is high-dimensional and complicated, the computational cost of the projection operation often becomes prohibitive. To handle this problem, we develop a distributed online Frank-Wolfe optimization algorithm combining with gradient tracking technique. We rigorously establish the dynamic regret bound of the proposed optim…
We present a new primal-dual algorithm for computing the value of the Lagrangian dual of a stochastic mixed-integer program (SMIP) formed by relaxing its nonanticipativity constraints. This dual is widely used in decomposition methods for the solution of SMIPs. The algorithm relies on the well-known progressive hedging method, but unlike previous progressive hedging approaches for SMIP, our algorithm can be shown to converge to the optimal Lagrangian dual value. The key improvement in the new algorithm is an inner loop of optimized linearization steps, similar to those taken in the classical F…
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a popular method for minimizing a smooth convex function $f$ over a compact convex set $\mathcal{C}$. While many convergence results have been derived in terms of function values, hardly nothing is known about the convergence behavior of the sequence of iterates $(x_t)_{t\in\mathbb{N}}$. Under the usual assumptions, we design several counterexamples to the convergence of $(x_t)_{t\in\mathbb{N}}$, where $f$ is $d$-time continuously differentiable, $d\geq2$, and $f(x_t)\to\min_\mathcal{C}f$. Our counterexamples cover the cases of open-loop, closed-loop, and line-sear…
We introduce a few variants on Frank-Wolfe style algorithms suitable for large scale optimization. We show how to modify the standard Frank-Wolfe algorithm using stochastic gradients, approximate subproblem solutions, and sketched decision variables in order to scale to enormous problems while preserving (up to constants) the optimal convergence rate $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{k})$.
