No Arabic abstract
We consider the problem of optimizing the sum of a smooth convex function and a non-smooth convex function using proximal-gradient methods, where an error is present in the calculation of the gradient of the smooth term or in the proximity operator with respect to the non-smooth term. We show that both the basic proximal-gradient method and the accelerated proximal-gradient method achieve the same convergence rate as in the error-free case, provided that the errors decrease at appropriate rates.Using these rates, we perform as well as or better than a carefully chosen fixed error level on a set of structured sparsity problems.
In this paper, an inexact proximal-point penalty method is studied for constrained optimization problems, where the objective function is non-convex, and the constraint functions can also be non-convex. The proposed method approximately solves a sequence of subproblems, each of which is formed by adding to the original objective function a proximal term and quadratic penalty terms associated to the constraint functions. Under a weak-convexity assumption, each subproblem is made strongly convex and can be solved effectively to a required accuracy by an optimal gradient-based method. The computational complexity of the proposed method is analyzed separately for the cases of convex constraint and non-convex constraint. For both cases, the complexity results are established in terms of the number of proximal gradient steps needed to find an $varepsilon$-stationary point. When the constraint functions are convex, we show a complexity result of $tilde O(varepsilon^{-5/2})$ to produce an $varepsilon$-stationary point under the Slaters condition. When the constraint functions are non-convex, the complexity becomes $tilde O(varepsilon^{-3})$ if a non-singularity condition holds on constraints and otherwise $tilde O(varepsilon^{-4})$ if a feasible initial solution is available.
We study the training of regularized neural networks where the regularizer can be non-smooth and non-convex. We propose a unified framework for stochastic proximal gradient descent, which we term ProxGen, that allows for arbitrary positive preconditioners and lower semi-continuous regularizers. Our framework encompasses standard stochastic proximal gradient methods without preconditioners as special cases, which have been extensively studied in various settings. Not only that, we present two important update rules beyond the well-known standard methods as a byproduct of our approach: (i) the first closed-form proximal mappings of $ell_q$ regularization ($0 leq q leq 1$) for adaptive stochastic gradient methods, and (ii) a revised version of ProxQuant that fixes a caveat of the original approach for quantization-specific regularizers. We analyze the convergence of ProxGen and show that the whole family of ProxGen enjoys the same convergence rate as stochastic proximal gradient descent without preconditioners. We also empirically show the superiority of proximal methods compared to subgradient-based approaches via extensive experiments. Interestingly, our results indicate that proximal methods with non-convex regularizers are more effective than those with convex regularizers.
We propose two novel conditional gradient-based methods for solving structured stochastic convex optimization problems with a large number of linear constraints. Instances of this template naturally arise from SDP-relaxations of combinatorial problems, which involve a number of constraints that is polynomial in the problem dimension. The most important feature of our framework is that only a subset of the constraints is processed at each iteration, thus gaining a computational advantage over prior works that require full passes. Our algorithms rely on variance reduction and smoothing used in conjunction with conditional gradient steps, and are accompanied by rigorous convergence guarantees. Preliminary numerical experiments are provided for illustrating the practical performance of the methods.
The Fast Proximal Gradient Method (FPGM) and the Monotone FPGM (MFPGM) for minimization of nonsmooth convex functions are introduced and applied to tomographic image reconstruction. Convergence properties of the sequence of objective function values are derived, including a $Oleft(1/k^{2}right)$ non-asymptotic bound. The presented theory broadens current knowledge and explains the convergence behavior of certain methods that are known to present good practical performance. Numerical experimentation involving computerized tomography image reconstruction shows the methods to be competitive in practical scenarios. Experimental comparison with Algebraic Reconstruction Techniques are performed uncovering certain behaviors of accelerated Proximal Gradient algorithms that apparently have not yet been noticed when these are applied to tomographic image reconstruction.
Matrix completion has attracted much interest in the past decade in machine learning and computer vision. For low-rank promotion in matrix completion, the nuclear norm penalty is convenient due to its convexity but has a bias problem. Recently, various algorithms using nonconvex penalties have been proposed, among which the proximal gradient descent (PGD) algorithm is one of the most efficient and effective. For the nonconvex PGD algorithm, whether it converges to a local minimizer and its convergence rate are still unclear. This work provides a nontrivial analysis on the PGD algorithm in the nonconvex case. Besides the convergence to a stationary point for a generalized nonconvex penalty, we provide more deep analysis on a popular and important class of nonconvex penalties which have discontinuous thresholding functions. For such penalties, we establish the finite rank convergence, convergence to restricted strictly local minimizer and eventually linear convergence rate of the PGD algorithm. Meanwhile, convergence to a local minimizer has been proved for the hard-thresholding penalty. Our result is the first shows that, nonconvex regularized matrix completion only has restricted strictly local minimizers, and the PGD algorithm can converge to such minimizers with eventually linear rate under certain conditions. Illustration of the PGD algorithm via experiments has also been provided. Code is available at https://github.com/FWen/nmc.