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Now showing 1 - 10 of 20
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    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.
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    Inexact relative smoothness and strong convexity for optimization and variational inequalities by inexact model
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Stonyakin, Fedor; Gasnikov, Alexander; Tyurin, Alexander; Pasechnyuk, Dmitry; Agafonov, Artem; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Dvinskikh, Darina; Artamonov, Sergei; Piskunova, Victorya
    In this paper we propose a general algorithmic framework for first-order methods in optimization in a broad sense, including minimization problems, saddle-point problems and variational inequalities. This framework allows to obtain many known methods as a special case, the list including accelerated gradient method, composite optimization methods, level-set methods, Bregman proximal methods. The idea of the framework is based on constructing an inexact model of the main problem component, i.e. objective function in optimization or operator in variational inequalities. Besides reproducing known results, our framework allows to construct new methods, which we illustrate by constructing a universal conditional gradient method and universal method for variational inequalities with composite structure. These method works for smooth and non-smooth problems with optimal complexity without a priori knowledge of the problem smoothness. As a particular case of our general framework, we introduce relative smoothness for operators and propose an algorithm for VIs with such operator. We also generalize our framework for relatively strongly convex objectives and strongly monotone variational inequalities.
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    Adaptive gradient descent for convex and non-convex stochastic optimization
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2019) Ogaltsov, Aleksandr; Dvinskikh, Darina; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander; Spokoiny, Vladimir
    In this paper we propose several adaptive gradient methods for stochastic optimization. Our methods are based on Armijo-type line search and they simultaneously adapt to the unknown Lipschitz constant of the gradient and variance of the stochastic approximation for the gradient. We consider an accelerated gradient descent for convex problems and gradient descent for non-convex problems. In the experiments we demonstrate superiority of our methods to existing adaptive methods, e.g. AdaGrad and Adam.
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    On accelerated alternating minimization
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Guminov, Sergey; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander
    Alternating minimization (AM) optimization algorithms have been known for a long time and are of importance in machine learning problems, among which we are mostly motivated by approximating optimal transport distances. AM algorithms assume that the decision variable is divided into several blocks and minimization in each block can be done explicitly or cheaply with high accuracy. The ubiquitous Sinkhorn's algorithm can be seen as an alternating minimization algorithm for the dual to the entropy-regularized optimal transport problem. We introduce an accelerated alternating minimization method with a $1/k^2$ convergence rate, where $k$ is the iteration counter. This improves over known bound $1/k$ for general AM methods and for the Sinkhorn's algorithm. Moreover, our algorithm converges faster than gradient-type methods in practice as it is free of the choice of the step-size and is adaptive to the local smoothness of the problem. We show that the proposed method is primal-dual, meaning that if we apply it to a dual problem, we can reconstruct the solution of the primal problem with the same convergence rate. We apply our method to the entropy regularized optimal transport problem and show experimentally, that it outperforms Sinkhorn's algorithm.
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    Near-optimal tensor methods for minimizing gradient norm
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander; Ostroukhov, Petr; Uribe, A. Cesar; Ivanova, Anastasiya
    Motivated by convex problems with linear constraints and, in particular, by entropy-regularized optimal transport, we consider the problem of finding approximate stationary points, i.e. points with the norm of the objective gradient less than small error, of convex functions with Lipschitz p-th order derivatives. Lower complexity bounds for this problem were recently proposed in [Grapiglia and Nesterov, arXiv:1907.07053]. However, the methods presented in the same paper do not have optimal complexity bounds. We propose two optimal up to logarithmic factors methods with complexity bounds with respect to the initial objective residual and the distance between the starting point and solution respectively
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    Advances in low-memory subgradient optimization
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander; Nurminski, Evgeni; Stonyakin, Fedor
    One of the main goals in the development of non-smooth optimization is to cope with high dimensional problems by decomposition, duality or Lagrangian relaxation which greatly reduces the number of variables at the cost of worsening differentiability of objective or constraints. Small or medium dimensionality of resulting non-smooth problems allows to use bundle-type algorithms to achieve higher rates of convergence and obtain higher accuracy, which of course came at the cost of additional memory requirements, typically of the order of n2, where n is the number of variables of non-smooth problem. However with the rapid development of more and more sophisticated models in industry, economy, finance, et all such memory requirements are becoming too hard to satisfy. It raised the interest in subgradient-based low-memory algorithms and later developments in this area significantly improved over their early variants still preserving O(n) memory requirements. To review these developments this chapter is devoted to the black-box subgradient algorithms with the minimal requirements for the storage of auxiliary results, which are necessary to execute these algorithms. To provide historical perspective this survey starts with the original result of N.Z. Shor which opened this field with the application to the classical transportation problem. The theoretical complexity bounds for smooth and non-smooth convex and quasi-convex optimization problems are briefly exposed in what follows to introduce to the relevant fundamentals of non-smooth optimization. Special attention in this section is given to the adaptive step-size policy which aims to attain lowest complexity bounds. Unfortunately the non-differentiability of objective function in convex optimization essentially slows down the theoretical low bounds for the rate of convergence in subgradient optimization compared to the smooth case but there are different modern techniques that allow to solve non-smooth convex optimization problems faster then dictate lower complexity bounds. In this work the particular attention is given to Nesterov smoothing technique, Nesterov Universal approach, and Legendre (saddle point) representation approach. The new results on Universal Mirror Prox algorithms represent the original parts of the survey. To demonstrate application of non-smooth convex optimization algorithms for solution of huge-scale extremal problems we consider convex optimization problems with non-smooth functional constraints and propose two adaptive Mirror Descent methods. The first method is of primal-dual variety and proved to be optimal in terms of lower oracle bounds for the class of Lipschitz-continuous convex objective and constraints. The advantages of application of this method to sparse Truss Topology Design problem are discussed in certain details. The second method can be applied for solution of convex and quasi-convex optimization problems and is optimal in a sense of complexity bounds. The conclusion part of the survey contains the important references that characterize recent developments of non-smooth convex optimization.
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    Oracle complexity separation in convex optimization
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2020) Ivanova, Anastasiya; Gasnikov, Alexander; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Dvinskikh, Darina; Tyurin, Alexander; Vorontsova, Evgeniya; Pasechnyuk, Dmitry
    Ubiquitous in machine learning regularized empirical risk minimization problems are often composed of several blocks which can be treated using different types of oracles, e.g., full gradient, stochastic gradient or coordinate derivative. Optimal oracle complexity is known and achievable separately for the full gradient case, the stochastic gradient case, etc. We propose a generic framework to combine optimal algorithms for different types of oracles in order to achieve separate optimal oracle complexity for each block, i.e. for each block the corresponding oracle is called the optimal number of times for a given accuracy. As a particular example, we demonstrate that for a combination of a full gradient oracle and either a stochastic gradient oracle or a coordinate descent oracle our approach leads to the optimal number of oracle calls separately for the full gradient part and the stochastic/coordinate descent part.
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    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.
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    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.
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    Inexact tensor methods and their application to stochastic convex optimization
    (Berlin : Weierstraß-Institut für Angewandte Analysis und Stochastik, 2021) Agafonov, Artem; Kamzolov, Dmitry; Dvurechensky, Pavel; Gasnikov, Alexander
    We propose a general non-accelerated tensor method under inexact information on higher- order derivatives, analyze its convergence rate, and provide sufficient conditions for this method to have similar complexity as the exact tensor method. As a corollary, we propose the first stochastic tensor method for convex optimization and obtain sufficient mini-batch sizes for each derivative.