Splitting Proximal Point Algorithms for the Sum of Prox-Convex Functions
Great Bay University（大湾区大学）；Great Bay Institute for Advanced Study（大湾区高等研究院）；Instituto Federal do Piauí（皮奥伊联邦学院）；Universidad de Tarapacá（塔拉帕卡大学）；Electric Power University（电力大学）
This paper addresses the minimization of a finite sum of prox-convex functions under Lipschitz continuity of each component. We propose two variants of the splitting proximal point algorithms proposed in \cite{Bacak,Bertsekas}: one deterministic with a fixed update order, and one stochastic with random sampling, and we extend them from convex to prox-convex functions. We prove global convergence for both methods under standard stepsize a\-ssump\-tions, with almost sure convergence for the stochastic variant via supermartingale theory. Numerical experiments with nonconvex quadratic functions illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methods and support the theoretical results.
We propose a level proximal subdifferential for a proper lower semicontinuous function. Level proximal subdifferential is a uniform refinement of the well-known proximal subdifferential, and has the pleasant feature that its resolvent always coincides with the proximal mapping of a function. It turns out that the resolvent representation of proximal mapping in terms of Mordukhovich limiting subdifferential is only valid for hypoconvex functions. We also provide properties of level proximal subdifferential and numerous examples to illustrate our results.
We provide a proximal average with repect to a $1$-coercive Legendre function. In the sense of Bregman distance, the Bregman envelope of the proximal average is a convex combination of Bregman envelopes of individual functions. The Bregman proximal mapping of the average is a convex combination of convexified proximal mappings of individual functions. Techniques from variational analysis provide the keys for the Bregman proximal average.
We provide comparison principles for convex functions through its proximal mappings. Consequently, we prove that the norm of the proximal operator determines a convex the function up to a constant. A new characterization of Lipschitzianity in terms of the proximal operator is given.
Based on a degenerate proximal point analysis, we show that the Douglas-Rachford splitting can be reduced to a well-defined resolvent, but generally fails to be a proximal mapping. This extends the recent result of [Bauschke, Schaad and Wang. Math. Program., 168 (2018), pp. 55-61] to more general setting. The related concepts and consequences are also discussed. In particular, the results regarding the maximal and cyclic monotonicity are instrumental for analyzing many operator splitting algorithms.
This paper studies a proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with variable metric indefinite proximal terms for linearly constrained convex optimization problems. The proximal ADMM plays an important role in many application areas, since the subproblems of the method are easy to solve. Recently, it is reported that the proximal ADMM with a certain fixed indefinite proximal term is faster than that with a positive semidefinite term, and still has the global convergence property. On the other hand, Gu and Yamashita studied a variable metric semidefinite proximal ADMM whose pr…
The proximal gradient descent method, well-known for composite optimization, can be completely described by the concept of proximal gradient mapping. In this paper, we highlight our previous two discoveries of proximal gradient mapping--norm monotonicity and refined descent, with which we are able to extend the recently proposed potential function-based framework from gradient descent to proximal gradient descent.
This paper considers the problem of minimizing the summation of a differentiable function and a nonsmooth function on a Riemannian manifold. In recent years, proximal gradient method and its invariants have been generalized to the Riemannian setting for solving such problems. Different approaches to generalize the proximal mapping to the Riemannian setting lead versions of Riemannian proximal gradient methods. However, their convergence analyses all rely on solving their Riemannian proximal mapping exactly, which is either too expensive or impracticable. In this paper, we study the convergence…
This paper proposes an accelerated proximal point method for maximally monotone operators. The proof is computer-assisted via the performance estimation problem approach. The proximal point method includes various well-known convex optimization methods, such as the proximal method of multipliers and the alternating direction method of multipliers, and thus the proposed acceleration has wide applications. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the accelerating behaviors.
In this paper, we study the convergence of an interior subgradient and proximal methods for a DC (difference of convex functions) constrained minimization problem.
In this paper, we present the proximal-proximal-gradient method (PPG), a novel optimization method that is simple to implement and simple to parallelize. PPG generalizes the proximal-gradient method and ADMM and is applicable to minimization problems written as a sum of many differentiable and many non-differentiable convex functions. The non-differentiable functions can be coupled. We furthermore present a related stochastic variation, which we call stochastic PPG (S-PPG). S-PPG can be interpreted as a generalization of Finito and MISO over to the sum of many coupled non-differentiable convex…
In this paper, we provide a simple convergence analysis of proximal gradient algorithm with Bregman distance, which provides a tighter bound than existing result. In particular, for the problem of minimizing a class of convex objective functions, we show that proximal gradient algorithm with Bregman distance can be viewed as proximal point algorithm that incorporates another Bregman distance. Consequently, the convergence result of the proximal gradient algorithm with Bregman distance follows directly from that of the proximal point algorithm with Bregman distance, and this leads to a simpler …
In this short survey, I revisit the role of the proximal point method in large scale optimization. I focus on three recent examples: a proximally guided subgradient method for weakly convex stochastic approximation, the prox-linear algorithm for minimizing compositions of convex functions and smooth maps, and Catalyst generic acceleration for regularized Empirical Risk Minimization.
We show that the asynchronous block-iterative primal-dual projective splitting framework introduced by P. L. Combettes and J. Eckstein in their 2018 Math. Program. paper can be viewed as an instantiation of the recently proposed warped proximal algorithm.
We give a novel proof of the $O(1/k)$ and $O(1/k^2)$ convergence rates of the proximal gradient and accelerated proximal gradient methods for composite convex minimization. The crux of the new proof is an upper bound constructed via the convex conjugate of the objective function.
Proximal gradient-type method with generalized distance and convergence analysis without global descent lemma
The Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan（日本统计数学研究所）；Joint Support-Center for Data Science Research, Japan（日本数据科学研究联合支持中心）；Department of Mathematics, College of Science and Technology, Nihon University, Japan（日本大学理工学部数学科）
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 paper, we introduce two parallel extragradient-proximal methods for solving split equilibrium problems. The algorithms combine the extragradient method, the proximal method and the hybrid (outer approximation) method. The weak and strong convergence theorems for iterative sequences generated by the algorithms are established under widely used assumptions for equilibrium bifunctions.
We systematically study the local single-valuedness of the Bregman proximal mapping and local smoothness of the Bregman--Moreau envelope of a nonconvex function under relative prox-regularity - an extension of prox-regularity - which was originally introduced by Poliquin and Rockafellar. As Bregman distances are asymmetric in general, in accordance with Bauschke et al., it is natural to consider two variants of the Bregman proximal mapping, which, depending on the order of the arguments, are called left and right Bregman proximal mapping. We consider the left Bregman proximal mapping first. Th…
This paper presents a proximal bundle variant, namely, the relaxed proximal bundle (RPB) method, for solving convex nonsmooth composite optimization problems. Like other proximal bundle variants, RPB solves a sequence of prox bundle subproblems whose objective functions are regularized composite cutting-plane models. Moreover, RPB uses a novel condition to decide whether to perform a serious or null iteration which does not necessarily yield a function value decrease. Optimal iteration-complexity bounds for RPB are established for a large range of prox stepsizes, both in the convex and strongl…
We introduce some new proximal quasi-Newton methods for unconstrained multiobjective optimization problems (in short, UMOP), where each objective function is the sum of a twice continuously differentiable strongly convex function and a proper lower semicontinuous convex but not necessarily differentiable function. We propose proximal BFGS method, proximal self-scaling BFGS method, and proximal Huang BFGS method for (UMOP) with both line searches and without line searches cases. Under mild assumputions, we show that each accumulation point of the sequence generated by these algorithms, if exist…
In this note, we establish a new exact worst-case linear convergence rate of the proximal gradient method in terms of the proximal gradient norm, which complements the recent results in [1] and implies a refined descent lemma.descent lemma. Based on the new lemma, we improve the linear convergence rate of the objective function accuracy under the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality.
In this paper the degenerate preconditioned proximal point algorithm will be combined with the idea of varying preconditioners leading to the degenerate variable metric proximal point algorithm. The weak convergence of the resulting iteration will be proven. From the perspective of the degenerate variable metric proximal point algorithm, a version of the primal-dual Douglas-Rachford method with varying preconditioners will be derived and a proof of its weak convergence which is based on the previous results for the proximal point algorithm, is provided, too. After that, we derive a heuristic o…
We present two approximate versions of the proximal subgradient method for minimizing the sum of two convex functions (not necessarily differentiable). The algorithms involve, at each iteration, inexact evaluations of the proximal operator and approximate subgradients of the functions (namely: the $ε$-subgradients). The methods use different error criteria for approximating the proximal operators. We provide an analysis of the convergence and rate of convergence properties of these methods, considering various stepsize rules, including both, diminishing and constant stepsizes. For the case whe…
In this paper we present an inexact proximal point method for variational inequality problem on Hadamard manifolds and study its convergence properties. The proposed algorithm is inexact in two sense. First, each proximal subproblem is approximated by using the enlargement of the vector field in consideration and then the next iterated is obtained by solving this subproblem allowing a suitable error tolerance. As an application, we obtain an inexact proximal point method for constrained optimization problems, equilibrium problems and nonlinear optimization problems on Hadamard manifolds.
In this note we review the iteration-complexity of a relaxed Hybrid-Proximal Extragradient Method under the large step condition. We also derive some useful proprieties of this method.
In this paper, we extend the proximal point algorithm for vector optimization from the Euclidean space to the Riemannian context. Under suitable assumptions on the objective function the well definition and full convergence of the method to a weak efficient point is proved.
In this work, we propose and study a framework of generalized proximal point algorithms associated with a maximally monotone operator. We indicate sufficient conditions on the regularization and relaxation parameters of generalized proximal point algorithms for the equivalence of the boundedness of the sequence of iterations generated by this algorithm and the non-emptiness of the zero set of the maximally monotone operator, and for the weak and strong convergence of the algorithm. Our results cover or improve many results on generalized proximal point algorithms in our references. Improvement…
In this paper, we study the interplay between acceleration and structure identification for the proximal gradient algorithm. We report and analyze several cases where this interplay has negative effects on the algorithm behavior (iterates oscillation, loss of structure, etc.). We present a generic method that tames acceleration when structure identification may be at stake; it benefits from a convergence rate that matches the one of the accelerated proximal gradient under some qualifying condition. We show empirically that the proposed method is much more stable in terms of subspace identifica…
In this note, we provide convergence results for the proximal point algorithm and a splitting variant thereof in the setting of CAT$(κ)$ spaces with $κ> 0$ using a recent definition for the resolvent of a convex, lower semi-continuous function due to Kimura and Kohsaka (J. Fixed Point Theory Appl. 18 (2016), 93-115).
We focus on the linear convergence of generalized proximal point algorithms for solving monotone inclusion problems. Under the assumption that the associated monotone operator is metrically subregular or that the inverse of the monotone operator is Lipschitz continuous, we provide Q-linear and R-linear convergence results on generalized proximal point algorithms. Comparisons between our results and related ones in the literature are presented in remarks of this work.
In this paper, we present a semi-proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving $3$-block separable convex minimization problems with the second block in the objective being a strongly convex function and one coupled linear equation constraint. By choosing the semi-proximal terms properly, we establish the global convergence of the proposed semi-proximal ADMM for the step-length $τ\in (0, (1+\sqrt{5})/2)$ and the penalty parameter $σ\in (0, +\infty)$. In particular, if $σ>0$ is smaller than a certain threshold and the first and third linear operators in the linear equa…
Structured convex optimization problems typically involve a mix of smooth and nonsmooth functions. The common practice is to activate the smooth functions via their gradient and the nonsmooth ones via their proximity operator. We show that, although intuitively natural, this approach is not necessarily the most efficient numerically and that, in particular, activating all the functions proximally may be advantageous. To make this viewpoint viable computationally, we derive a number of new examples of proximity operators of smooth convex functions arising in applications. A novel variational mo…
We propose new proximal bundle algorithms for minimizing a nonsmooth convex function. These algorithms are derived from the application of Nesterov fast gradient methods for smooth convex minimization to the so-called Moreau-Yosida regularization $F_μ$ of $f$ w.r.t. some $μ>0$. Since the exact values and gradients of $F_μ$ are difficult to evaluate, we use approximate proximal points thanks to a bundle strategy to get implementable algorithms. One of these algorithms appears as an implementable version of a special case of inertial proximal algorithm. We give their complexity estimates in term…
Perspective functions arise explicitly or implicitly in various forms in applied mathematics and in statistical data analysis. To date, no systematic strategy is available to solve the associated, typically nonsmooth, optimization problems. In this paper, we fill this gap by showing that proximal methods provide an efficient framework to model and solve problems involving perspective functions. We study the construction of the proximity operator of a perspective function under general assumptions and present important instances in which the proximity operator can be computed explicitly or via …
We investigate the proximal map for the weighted mean absolute error function. An algorithm for its efficient and vectorized evaluation is presented. As a demonstration, this algorithm is applied as part of a checkerboard algorithm to solve a total-variation image denoising (ROF) problem as well as a non-smooth energy minimization problem.
In this paper an inexact proximal point method for variational inequalities in Hadamard manifolds is introduced and studied its convergence properties. The main tool used for presenting the method is the concept of enlargement of monotone vector fields, which generalizes the concept of enlargement of monotone operators from the linear setting to the Riemannian context. As an application, an inexact proximal point method for constrained optimization problems is obtained.
In this paper we present a variant of the proximal forward-backward splitting iteration for solving nonsmooth optimization problems in Hilbert spaces, when the objective function is the sum of two nondifferentiable convex functions. The proposed iteration, which will be called Proximal Subgradient Splitting Method, extends the classical subgradient iteration for important classes of problems, exploiting the additive structure of the objective function. The weak convergence of the generated sequence was established using different stepsizes and under suitable assumptions. Moreover, we analyze t…
This paper proposes a two-point inertial proximal point algorithm to find zero of maximal monotone operators in Hilbert spaces. We obtain weak convergence results and non-asymptotic $O(1/n)$ convergence rate of our proposed algorithm in non-ergodic sense. Applications of our results to various well-known convex optimization methods, such as the proximal method of multipliers and the alternating direction method of multipliers are given. Numerical results are given to demonstrate the accelerating behaviors of our method over other related methods in the literature.
