Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
  • Item
    Hyperfast second-order local solvers for efficient statistically preconditioned distributed optimization
    (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 2022) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Kamzolov, Dmitry; Lukashevich, Aleksandr; Lee, Soomin; Ordentlich, Erik; Uribe, César A.; Gasnikov, Alexander
    Statistical preconditioning enables fast methods for distributed large-scale empirical risk minimization problems. In this approach, multiple worker nodes compute gradients in parallel, which are then used by the central node to update the parameter by solving an auxiliary (preconditioned) smaller-scale optimization problem. The recently proposed Statistically Preconditioned Accelerated Gradient (SPAG) method [1] has complexity bounds superior to other such algorithms but requires an exact solution for computationally intensive auxiliary optimization problems at every iteration. In this paper, we propose an Inexact SPAG (InSPAG) and explicitly characterize the accuracy by which the corresponding auxiliary subproblem needs to be solved to guarantee the same convergence rate as the exact method. We build our results by first developing an inexact adaptive accelerated Bregman proximal gradient method for general optimization problems under relative smoothness and strong convexity assumptions, which may be of independent interest. Moreover, we explore the properties of the auxiliary problem in the InSPAG algorithm assuming Lipschitz third-order derivatives and strong convexity. For such problem class, we develop a linearly convergent Hyperfast second-order method and estimate the total complexity of the InSPAG method with hyperfast auxiliary problem solver. Finally, we illustrate the proposed method's practical efficiency by performing large-scale numerical experiments on logistic regression models. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first empirical results on implementing high-order methods on large-scale problems, as we work with data where the dimension is of the order of 3 million, and the number of samples is 700 million.
  • Item
    First-Order Methods for Convex Optimization
    (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 2021) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Shtern, Shimrit; Staudigl, Mathias
    First-order methods for solving convex optimization problems have been at the forefront of mathematical optimization in the last 20 years. The rapid development of this important class of algorithms is motivated by the success stories reported in various applications, including most importantly machine learning, signal processing, imaging and control theory. First-order methods have the potential to provide low accuracy solutions at low computational complexity which makes them an attractive set of tools in large-scale optimization problems. In this survey, we cover a number of key developments in gradient-based optimization methods. This includes non-Euclidean extensions of the classical proximal gradient method, and its accelerated versions. Additionally we survey recent developments within the class of projection-free methods, and proximal versions of primal-dual schemes. We give complete proofs for various key results, and highlight the unifying aspects of several optimization algorithms.
  • Item
    Accelerated variance-reduced methods for saddle-point problems
    (Amsterdam : Elsevier, 2022) Borodich, Ekaterina; Tominin, Vladislav; Tominin, Yaroslav; Kovalev, Dmitry; Gasnikov, Alexander; Dvurechensky, Pavel
    We consider composite minimax optimization problems where the goal is to find a saddle-point of a large sum of non-bilinear objective functions augmented by simple composite regularizers for the primal and dual variables. For such problems, under the average-smoothness assumption, we propose accelerated stochastic variance-reduced algorithms with optimal up to logarithmic factors complexity bounds. In particular, we consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave, convex-strongly-concave, and convex-concave objectives. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first nearly-optimal algorithms for this setting.
  • Item
    Generalized self-concordant analysis of Frank–Wolfe algorithms
    (Berlin ; Heidelberg : Springer, 2022) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Safin, Kamil; Shtern, Shimrit; Staudigl, Mathias
    Projection-free optimization via different variants of the Frank–Wolfe method has become one of the cornerstones of large scale optimization for machine learning and computational statistics. Numerous applications within these fields involve the minimization of functions with self-concordance like properties. Such generalized self-concordant functions do not necessarily feature a Lipschitz continuous gradient, nor are they strongly convex, making them a challenging class of functions for first-order methods. Indeed, in a number of applications, such as inverse covariance estimation or distance-weighted discrimination problems in binary classification, the loss is given by a generalized self-concordant function having potentially unbounded curvature. For such problems projection-free minimization methods have no theoretical convergence guarantee. This paper closes this apparent gap in the literature by developing provably convergent Frank–Wolfe algorithms with standard O(1/k) convergence rate guarantees. Based on these new insights, we show how these sublinearly convergent methods can be accelerated to yield linearly convergent projection-free methods, by either relying on the availability of a local liner minimization oracle, or a suitable modification of the away-step Frank–Wolfe method.
  • Item
    Distributed optimization with quantization for computing Wasserstein barycenters
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Krawchenko, Roman; Uribe, César A.; Gasnikov, Alexander; Dvurechensky, Pavel
    We study the problem of the decentralized computation of entropy-regularized semi-discrete Wasserstein barycenters over a network. Building upon recent primal-dual approaches, we propose a sampling gradient quantization scheme that allows efficient communication and computation of approximate barycenters where the factor distributions are stored distributedly on arbitrary networks. The communication and algorithmic complexity of the proposed algorithm are shown, with explicit dependency on the size of the support, the number of distributions, and the desired accuracy. Numerical results validate our algorithmic analysis.
  • Item
    Gradient methods for problems with inexact model of the objective
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Stonyakin, Fedor; Dvinskikh, Darina; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Kroshnin, Alexey; Kuznetsova, Olesya; Agafonov, Artem; Gasnikov, Alexander; Tyurin, Alexander; Uribe, Cesar A.; Pasechnyuk, Dmitry; Artamonov, Sergei
    We consider optimization methods for convex minimization problems under inexact information on the objective function. We introduce inexact model of the objective, which as a particular cases includes inexact oracle [19] and relative smoothness condition [43]. We analyze gradient method which uses this inexact model and obtain convergence rates for convex and strongly convex problems. To show potential applications of our general framework we consider three particular problems. The first one is clustering by electorial model introduced in [49]. The second one is approximating optimal transport distance, for which we propose a Proximal Sinkhorn algorithm. The third one is devoted to approximating optimal transport barycenter and we propose a Proximal Iterative Bregman Projections algorithm. We also illustrate the practical performance of our algorithms by numerical experiments.
  • Item
    On the optimal combination of tensor optimization methods
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Kamzolov, Dmitry; Gasnikov, Alexander; Dvurechensky, Pavel
    We consider the minimization problem of a sum of a number of functions having Lipshitz p -th order derivatives with different Lipschitz constants. In this case, to accelerate optimization, we propose a general framework allowing to obtain near-optimal oracle complexity for each function in the sum separately, meaning, in particular, that the oracle for a function with lower Lipschitz constant is called a smaller number of times. As a building block, we extend the current theory of tensor methods and show how to generalize near-optimal tensor methods to work with inexact tensor step. Further, we investigate the situation when the functions in the sum have Lipschitz derivatives of a different order. For this situation, we propose a generic way to separate the oracle complexity between the parts of the sum. Our method is not optimal, which leads to an open problem of the optimal combination of oracles of a different order.
  • Item
    Zeroth-order algorithms for smooth saddle-point problems
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2021) Sadiev, Abdurakhmon; Beznosikov, Aleksandr; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander
    Saddle-point problems have recently gained an increased attention from the machine learning community, mainly due to applications in training Generative Adversarial Networks using stochastic gradients. At the same time, in some applications only a zeroth-order oracle is available. In this paper, we propose several algorithms to solve stochastic smooth (strongly) convex-concave saddle- point problems using zeroth-order oracles, and estimate their convergence rate and its dependence on the dimension n of the variable. In particular, our analysis shows that in the case when the feasible set is a direct product of two simplices, our convergence rate for the stochastic term is only by a log n factor worse than for the first-order methods. We also consider a mixed setup and develop 1/2th-order methods which use zeroth-order oracle for the minimization part and first-order oracle for the maximization part. Finally, we demonstrate the practical performance of our zeroth-order and 1/2th-order methods on practical problems.
  • Item
    On the complexity of approximating Wasserstein barycenter
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Kroshnin, Alexey; Dvinskikh, Darina; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander; Tupitsa, Nazarii; Uribe, César A.
    We study the complexity of approximating Wassertein barycenter of discrete measures, or histograms by contrasting two alternative approaches, both using entropic regularization. We provide a novel analysis for our approach based on the Iterative Bregman Projections (IBP) algorithm to approximate the original non-regularized barycenter. We also get the complexity bound for alternative accelerated-gradient-descent-based approach and compare it with the bound obtained for IBP. As a byproduct, we show that the regularization parameter in both approaches has to be proportional to ", which causes instability of both algorithms when the desired accuracy is high. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel proximal-IBP algorithm, which can be seen as a proximal gradient method, which uses IBP on each iteration to make a proximal step. We also consider the question of scalability of these algorithms using approaches from distributed optimization and show that the first algorithm can be implemented in a centralized distributed setting (master/slave), while the second one is amenable to a more general decentralized distributed setting with an arbitrary network topology.
  • Item
    Generalized self-concordant Hessian-barrier algorithms
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Staudigl, Mathias; Uribe , Casar A.
    Many problems in statistical learning, imaging, and computer vision involve the optimization of a non-convex objective function with singularities at the boundary of the feasible set. For such challenging instances, we develop a new interior-point technique building on the Hessian-barrier algorithm recently introduced in Bomze, Mertikopoulos, Schachinger and Staudigl, [SIAM J. Opt. 2019 29(3), pp. 2100-2127], where the Riemannian metric is induced by a generalized selfconcordant function. This class of functions is sufficiently general to include most of the commonly used barrier functions in the literature of interior point methods. We prove global convergence to an approximate stationary point of the method, and in cases where the feasible set admits an easily computable self-concordant barrier, we verify worst-case optimal iteration complexity of the method. Applications in non-convex statistical estimation and Lp-minimization are discussed to given the efficiency of the method.