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Register a new userRelatively-Smooth Convex Optimization by First-Order Methods, and Applications
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The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant $L$. However, in many settings the differentiable convex function $f(cdot)$ is not uniformly smooth -- for example in $D$-optimal design where $f(x):=-ln det(HXH^T)$, or even the univariate setting with $f(x) := -ln(x) + x^2$. Herein we develop a notion of relative smoothness and relative strong convexity that is determined relative to a user-specified reference function $h(cdot)$ (that should be computationally tractable for algorithms), and we show that many differentiable convex functions are relatively smooth with respect to a correspondingly fairly-simple reference function $h(cdot)$. We extend two standard algorithms -- the primal gradient scheme and the dual averaging scheme -- to our new setting, with associated computational guarantees. We apply our new approach to develop a new first-order method for the $D$-optimal design problem, with associated computational complexity analysis. Some of our results have a certain overlap with the recent work cite{bbt}.
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In recent years, the success of deep learning has inspired many researchers to study the optimization of general smooth non-convex functions. However, recent works have established pessimistic worst-case complexities for this class functions, which is in stark contrast with their superior performance in real-world applications (e.g. training deep neural networks). On the other hand, it is found that many popular non-convex optimization problems enjoy certain structured properties which bear some similarities to convexity. In this paper, we study the class of textit{quasar-convex functions} to close the gap between theory and practice. We study the convergence of first order methods in a variety of different settings and under different optimality criterions. We prove complexity upper bounds that are similar to standard results established for convex functions and much better that state-of-the-art convergence rates of non-convex functions. Overall, this paper suggests that textit{quasar-convexity} allows efficient optimization procedures, and we are looking forward to seeing more problems that demonstrate similar properties in practice.
We provide improved convergence rates for various emph{non-smooth} optimization problems via higher-order accelerated methods. In the case of $ell_infty$ regression, we achieves an $O(epsilon^{-4/5})$ iteration complexity, breaking the $O(epsilon^{-1})$ barrier so far present for previous methods. We arrive at a similar rate for the problem of $ell_1$-SVM, going beyond what is attainable by first-order methods with prox-oracle access for non-smooth non-strongly convex problems. We further show how to achieve even faster rates by introducing higher-order regularization. Our results rely on recent advances in near-optimal accelerated methods for higher-order smooth convex optimization. In particular, we extend Nesterovs smoothing technique to show that the standard softmax approximation is not only smooth in the usual sense, but also emph{higher-order} smooth. With this observation in hand, we provide the first example of higher-order acceleration techniques yielding faster rates for emph{non-smooth} optimization, to the best of our knowledge.
We study gradient-based optimization methods obtained by direct Runge-Kutta discretization of the ordinary differential equation (ODE) describing the movement of a heavy-ball under constant friction coefficient. When the function is high order smooth and strongly convex, we show that directly simulating the ODE with known numerical integrators achieve acceleration in a nontrivial neighborhood of the optimal solution. In particular, the neighborhood can grow larger as the condition number of the function increases. Furthermore, our results also hold for nonconvex but quasi-strongly convex objectives. We provide numerical experiments that verify the theoretical rates predicted by our results.
We present a unified convergence analysis for first order convex optimization methods using the concept of strong Lyapunov conditions. Combining this with suitable time scaling factors, we are able to handle both convex and strong convex cases, and establish contraction properties of Lyapunov functions for many existing ordinary differential equation models. Then we derive prevailing first order optimization algorithms, such as proximal gradient methods, heavy ball methods (also known as momentum methods), Nesterov accelerated gradient methods, and accelerated proximal gradient methods from numerical discretizations of corresponding dynamical systems. We also apply strong Lyapunov conditions to the discrete level and provide a more systematical analysis framework. Another contribution is a novel second order dynamical system called Hessian-driven Nesterov accelerated gradient flow which can be used to design and analyze accelerated first order methods for smooth and non-smooth convex optimizations.
We propose first-order methods based on a level-set technique for convex constrained optimization that satisfies an error bound condition with unknown growth parameters. The proposed approach solves the original problem by solving a sequence of unconstrained subproblems defined with different level parameters. Different from the existing level-set methods where the subproblems are solved sequentially, our method applies a first-order method to solve each subproblem independently and simultaneously, which can be implemented with either a single or multiple processors. Once the objective value of one subproblem is reduced by a constant factor, a sequential restart is performed to update the level parameters and restart the first-order methods. When the problem is non-smooth, our method finds an $epsilon$-optimal and $epsilon$-feasible solution by computing at most $O(frac{G^{2/d}}{epsilon^{2-2/d}}ln^3(frac{1}{epsilon}))$ subgradients where $G>0$ and $dgeq 1$ are the growth rate and the exponent, respectively, in the error bound condition. When the problem is smooth, the complexity is improved to $O(frac{G^{1/d}}{epsilon^{1-1/d}}ln^3(frac{1}{epsilon}))$. Our methods do not require knowing $G$, $d$ and any problem dependent parameters.
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