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We introduce a framework for designing primal methods under the decentralized optimization setting where local functions are smooth and strongly convex. Our approach consists of approximately solving a sequence of sub-problems induced by the accelerated augmented Lagrangian method, thereby providing a systematic way for deriving several well-known decentralized algorithms including EXTRA arXiv:1404.6264 and SSDA arXiv:1702.08704. When coupled with accelerated gradient descent, our framework yields a novel primal algorithm whose convergence rate is optimal and matched by recently derived lower bounds. We provide experimental results that demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on highly ill-conditioned problems.
Support vector machines (SVMs) are successful modeling and prediction tools with a variety of applications. Previous work has demonstrated the superiority of the SVMs in dealing with the high dimensional, low sample size problems. However, the numerical difficulties of the SVMs will become severe with the increase of the sample size. Although there exist many solvers for the SVMs, only few of them are designed by exploiting the special structures of the SVMs. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient sparse semismooth Newton based augmented Lagrangian method for solving a large-scale convex quadratic programming problem with a linear equality constraint and a simple box constraint, which is generated from the dual problems of the SVMs. By leveraging the primal-dual error bound result, the fast local convergence rate of the augmented Lagrangian method can be guaranteed. Furthermore, by exploiting the second-order sparsity of the problem when using the semismooth Newton method,the algorithm can efficiently solve the aforementioned difficult problems. Finally, numerical comparisons demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the current state-of-the-art solvers for the large-scale SVMs.
In this work, we consider the decentralized optimization problem in which a network of $n$ agents, each possessing a smooth and convex objective function, wish to collaboratively minimize the average of all the objective functions through peer-to-peer communication in a directed graph. To solve the problem, we propose two accelerated Push-DIGing methods termed APD and APD-SC for minimizing non-strongly convex objective functions and strongly convex ones, respectively. We show that APD and APD-SC respectively converge at the rates $Oleft(frac{1}{k^2}right)$ and $Oleft(left(1 - Csqrt{frac{mu}{L}}right)^kright)$ up to constant factors depending only on the mixing matrix. To the best of our knowledge, APD and APD-SC are the first decentralized methods to achieve provable acceleration over unbalanced directed graphs. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of both methods.
Support vector machine (SVM) has proved to be a successful approach for machine learning. Two typical SVM models are the L1-loss model for support vector classification (SVC) and $epsilon$-L1-loss model for support vector regression (SVR). Due to the nonsmoothness of the L1-loss function in the two models, most of the traditional approaches focus on solving the dual problem. In this paper, we propose an augmented Lagrangian method for the L1-loss model, which is designed to solve the primal problem. By tackling the nonsmooth term in the model with Moreau-Yosida regularization and the proximal operator, the subproblem in augmented Lagrangian method reduces to a nonsmooth linear system, which can be solved via the quadratically convergent semismooth Newtons method. Moreover, the high computational cost in semismooth Newtons method can be significantly reduced by exploring the sparse structure in the generalized Jacobian. Numerical results on various datasets in LIBLINEAR show that the proposed method is competitive with the most popular solvers in both speed and accuracy.
This paper studies decentralized convex optimization problems defined over networks, where the objective is to minimize a sum of local smooth convex functions while respecting a common constraint. Two new algorithms based on dual averaging and decentralized consensus-seeking are proposed. The first one accelerates the standard convergence rate $O(frac{1}{sqrt{t}})$ in existing decentralized dual averaging (DDA) algorithms to $O(frac{1}{t})$, where $t$ is the time counter. This is made possible by a second-order consensus scheme that assists each agent to locally track the global dual variable more accurately and a new analysis of the descent property for the mean variable. We remark that, in contrast to its primal counterparts, this method decouples the synchronization step from nonlinear projection, leading to a rather concise analysis and a natural extension to stochastic networks. In the second one, two local sequences of primal variables are constructed in a decentralized manner to achieve acceleration, where only one of them is exchanged between agents. In addition to this, another consensus round is performed for local dual variables. The convergence rate is proved to be $O(1)(frac{1}{t^2}+frac{1}{t})$, where the magnitude of error bound is showed to be inversely proportional to the algebraic connectivity of the graph. However, the condition for stepsize does not rely on the weight matrix associated with the graph, making it easier to satisfy in practice than other accelerated methods. Finally, comparisons between the proposed methods and several recent algorithms are performed using a large-scale LASSO problem.
The augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) is a fundamental tool for solving the canonical convex minimization problem with linear constraints, and efficiently and easily how to implement the original ALM is affirmatively significant. Recently, He and Yuan have proposed a balanced version of ALM [B.S. He and X.M. Yuan, arXiv:2108.08554, 2021], which reshapes the original ALM by balancing its subproblems and makes the benchmark ALM easier to implement without any additional condition. In practice, the balanced ALM updates the new iterate by a primal-dual order. In this note, exploiting the variational inequality structure of the most recent balanced ALM, we propose a dual-primal version of the balanced ALM for linearly constrained convex minimization problems. The novel proposed method generates the new iterate by a dual-primal order and enjoys the same computational difficulty with the original primal-dual balanced ALM. Furthermore, under the lens of the proximal point algorithm, we conduct the convergence analysis of the novel introduced method in the context of variational inequalities. Numerical tests on the basic pursuit problem demonstrate that the introduced method enjoys the same high efficiency with the prototype balanced ALM.