We consider minimization of functions that are compositions of convex or prox-regular functions (possibly extended-valued) with smooth vector functions. A wide variety of important optimization problems fall into this framework. We describe an algorithmic framework based on a subproblem constructed from a linearized approximation to the objective and a regularization term. Properties of local solutions of this subproblem underlie both a global convergence result and an identification property of the active manifold containing the solution of the original problem. Preliminary computational results on both convex and nonconvex examples are promising.
We examine the linear convergence rates of variants of the proximal point method for finding zeros of maximal monotone operators. We begin by showing how metric subregularity is sufficient for linear convergence to a zero of a maximal monotone operator. This result is then generalized to obtain convergence rates for the problem of finding a common zero of multiple monotone operators by considering randomized and averaged proximal methods.
This paper is concerned with a class of zero-norm regularized piecewise linear-quadratic (PLQ) composite minimization problems, which covers the zero-norm regularized $ell_1$-loss minimization problem as a special case. For this class of nonconvex nonsmooth problems, we show that its equivalent MPEC reformulation is partially calm on the set of global optima and make use of this property to derive a family of equivalent DC surrogates. Then, we propose a proximal majorization-minimization (MM) method, a convex relaxation approach not in the DC algorithm framework, for solving one of the DC surrogates which is a semiconvex PLQ minimization problem involving three nonsmooth terms. For this method, we establish its global convergence and linear rate of convergence, and under suitable conditions show that the limit of the generated sequence is not only a local optimum but also a good critical point in a statistical sense. Numerical experiments are conducted with synthetic and real data for the proximal MM method with the subproblems solved by a dual semismooth Newton method to confirm our theoretical findings, and numerical comparisons with a convergent indefinite-proximal ADMM for the partially smoothed DC surrogate verify its superiority in the quality of solutions and computing time.
In this paper, we introduce a proximal-proximal majorization-minimization (PPMM) algorithm for nonconvex tuning-free robust regression problems. The basic idea is to apply the proximal majorization-minimization algorithm to solve the nonconvex problem with the inner subproblems solved by a sparse semismooth Newton (SSN) method based proximal point algorithm (PPA). We must emphasize that the main difficulty in the design of the algorithm lies in how to overcome the singular difficulty of the inner subproblem. Furthermore, we also prove that the PPMM algorithm converges to a d-stationary point. Due to the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property of the problem, we present the convergence rate of the PPMM algorithm. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing state-of-the-art algorithms.
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and nonconvex cases. Most of them require a large number of samples in some or all iterations of the improved SGMs. In this paper, we propose a new SGM, named PStorm, for solving nonconvex nonsmooth stochastic problems. With a momentum-based variance reduction technique, PStorm can achieve the optimal complexity result $O(varepsilon^{-3})$ to produce a stochastic $varepsilon$-stationary solution, if a mean-squared smoothness condition holds and $Theta(varepsilon^{-1})$ samples are available for the initial update. Different from existing optimal methods, PStorm can still achieve a near-optimal complexity result $tilde{O}(varepsilon^{-3})$ by using only one or $O(1)$ samples in every update. With this property, PStorm can be applied to online learning problems that favor real-time decisions based on one or $O(1)$ new observations. In addition, for large-scale machine learning problems, PStorm can generalize better by small-batch training than other optimal methods that require large-batch training and the vanilla SGM, as we demonstrate on training a sparse fully-connected neural network and a sparse convolutional neural network.
We address the numerical approximation of Mean Field Games with local couplings. For power-like Hamiltonians, we consider both unconstrained and constrained stationary systems with density constraints in order to model hard congestion effects. For finite difference discretizations of the Mean Field Game system, we follow a variational approach. We prove that the aforementioned schemes can be obtained as the optimality system of suitably defined optimization problems. In order to prove the existence of solutions of the scheme with a variational argument, the monotonicity of the coupling term is not used, which allow us to recover general existence results. Next, assuming next that the coupling term is monotone, the variational problem is cast as a convex optimization problem for which we study and compare several proximal type methods. These algorithms have several interesting features, such as global convergence and stability with respect to the viscosity parameter, which can eventually be zero. We assess the performance of the methods via numerical experiments.