arXiv subjects

Nikita Doikov

Publications and source records attributed to Nikita Doikov.

30 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Super-Universal Regularized Newton Method

We analyze the performance of a variant of Newton method with quadratic regularization for solving composite convex minimization problems. At each step of our method, we choose regularization parameter proportional to a certain power of the gradient norm at the current point. We introduce a family of problem classes characterized by Hölder continuity of either the second or third derivative. Then we present the method with a simple adaptive search procedure allowing an automatic adjustment to the problem class with the best global complexity bounds, without knowing specific parameters of the problem. In particular, for the class of functions with Lipschitz continuous third derivative, we get the global $O(1/k^3)$ rate, which was previously attributed to third-order tensor methods. When the objective function is uniformly convex, we justify an automatic acceleration of our scheme, resulting in a faster global rate and local superlinear convergence. The switching between the different rates (sublinear, linear, and superlinear) is automatic. Again, for that, no a priori knowledge of parameters is needed.

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arXiv2022

Lower Complexity Bounds for Minimizing Regularized Functions

In this paper, we establish lower bounds for the oracle complexity of the first-order methods minimizing regularized convex functions. We consider the composite representation of the objective. The smooth part has Hölder continuous gradient of degree $ν\in [0, 1]$ and is accessible by a black-box local oracle. The composite part is a power of a norm. We prove that the best possible rate for the first-order methods in the large-scale setting for Euclidean norms is of the order $O(k^{- p(1 + 3ν) / (2(p - 1 - ν))})$ for the functional residual, where $k$ is the iteration counter and $p$ is the power of regularization. Our formulation covers several cases, including computation of the Cubically regularized Newton step by the first-order gradient methods, in which case the rate becomes $O(k^{-6})$. It can be achieved by the Fast Gradient Method. Thus, our result proves the latter rate to be optimal. We also discover lower complexity bounds for non-Euclidean norms.

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arXiv2021

Gradient Regularization of Newton Method with Bregman Distances

In this paper, we propose a first second-order scheme based on arbitrary non-Euclidean norms, incorporated by Bregman distances. They are introduced directly in the Newton iterate with regularization parameter proportional to the square root of the norm of the current gradient. For the basic scheme, as applied to the composite optimization problem, we establish the global convergence rate of the order $O(k^{-2})$ both in terms of the functional residual and in the norm of subgradients. Our main assumption on the smooth part of the objective is Lipschitz continuity of its Hessian. For uniformly convex functions of degree three, we justify global linear rate, and for strongly convex function we prove the local superlinear rate of convergence. Our approach can be seen as a relaxation of the Cubic Regularization of the Newton method, which preserves its convergence properties, while the auxiliary subproblem at each iteration is simpler. We equip our method with adaptive line search procedure for choosing the regularization parameter. We propose also an accelerated scheme with convergence rate $O(k^{-3})$, where $k$ is the iteration counter.

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arXiv2021

Contracting Proximal Methods for Smooth Convex Optimization

In this paper, we propose new accelerated methods for smooth convex optimization, called contracting proximal methods. At every step of these methods, we need to minimize a contracted version of the objective function augmented by a regularization term in the form of Bregman divergence. We provide global convergence analysis for a general scheme admitting inexactness in solving the auxiliary subproblem. In the case of using for this purpose high-order tensor methods, we demonstrate an acceleration effect for both convex and uniformly convex composite objective functions. Thus, our construction explains acceleration for methods of any order starting from one. The augmentation of the number of calls of oracle due to computing the contracted proximal steps is limited by the logarithmic factor in the worst-case complexity bound.

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arXiv2021

Local convergence of tensor methods

In this paper, we study local convergence of high-order Tensor Methods for solving convex optimization problems with composite objective. We justify local superlinear convergence under the assumption of uniform convexity of the smooth component, having Lipschitz-continuous high-order derivative. The convergence both in function value and in the norm of minimal subgradient is established. Global complexity bounds for the Composite Tensor Method in convex and uniformly convex cases are also discussed. Lastly, we show how local convergence of the methods can be globalized using the inexact proximal iterations.

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arXiv2021

Minimizing Uniformly Convex Functions by Cubic Regularization of Newton Method

In this paper, we study the iteration complexity of cubic regularization of Newton method for solving composite minimization problems with uniformly convex objective. We introduce the notion of second-order condition number of a certain degree and justify the linear rate of convergence in a nondegenerate case for the method with an adaptive estimate of the regularization parameter. The algorithm automatically achieves the best possible global complexity bound among different problem classes of uniformly convex objective functions with Hölder continuous Hessian of the smooth part of the objective. As a byproduct of our developments, we justify an intuitively plausible result that the global iteration complexity of the Newton method is always better than that of the gradient method on the class of strongly convex functions with uniformly bounded second derivative.

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arXiv2021

Optimization Methods for Fully Composite Problems

In this paper, we propose a new Fully Composite Formulation of convex optimization problems. It includes, as a particular case, the problems with functional constraints, max-type minimization problems, and problems of Composite Minimization, where the objective can have simple nondifferentiable components. We treat all these formulations in a unified way, highlighting the existence of very natural optimization schemes of different order. We prove the global convergence rates for our methods under the most general conditions. Assuming that the upper-level component of our objective function is subhomogeneous, we develop efficient modification of the basic Fully Composite first-order and second-order Methods, and propose their accelerated variants.

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arXiv2020

Inexact Tensor Methods with Dynamic Accuracies

In this paper, we study inexact high-order Tensor Methods for solving convex optimization problems with composite objective. At every step of such methods, we use approximate solution of the auxiliary problem, defined by the bound for the residual in function value. We propose two dynamic strategies for choosing the inner accuracy: the first one is decreasing as $1/k^{p + 1}$, where $p \geq 1$ is the order of the method and $k$ is the iteration counter, and the second approach is using for the inner accuracy the last progress in the target objective. We show that inexact Tensor Methods with these strategies achieve the same global convergence rate as in the error-free case. For the second approach we also establish local superlinear rates (for $p \geq 2$), and propose the accelerated scheme. Lastly, we present computational results on a variety of machine learning problems for several methods and different accuracy policies.

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arXiv2020

Convex optimization based on global lower second-order models

In this paper, we present new second-order algorithms for composite convex optimization, called Contracting-domain Newton methods. These algorithms are affine-invariant and based on global second-order lower approximation for the smooth component of the objective. Our approach has an interpretation both as a second-order generalization of the conditional gradient method, or as a variant of trust-region scheme. Under the assumption, that the problem domain is bounded, we prove $\mathcal{O}(1/k^{2})$ global rate of convergence in functional residual, where $k$ is the iteration counter, minimizing convex functions with Lipschitz continuous Hessian. This significantly improves the previously known bound $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ for this type of algorithms. Additionally, we propose a stochastic extension of our method, and present computational results for solving empirical risk minimization problem.

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arXiv2020

Affine-invariant contracting-point methods for Convex Optimization

In this paper, we develop new affine-invariant algorithms for solving composite convex minimization problems with bounded domain. We present a general framework of Contracting-Point methods, which solve at each iteration an auxiliary subproblem restricting the smooth part of the objective function onto contraction of the initial domain. This framework provides us with a systematic way for developing optimization methods of different order, endowed with the global complexity bounds. We show that using an appropriate affine-invariant smoothness condition, it is possible to implement one iteration of the Contracting-Point method by one step of the pure tensor method of degree $p \geq 1$. The resulting global rate of convergence in functional residual is then ${\cal O}(1 / k^p)$, where $k$ is the iteration counter. It is important that all constants in our bounds are affine-invariant. For $p = 1$, our scheme recovers well-known Frank-Wolfe algorithm, providing it with a new interpretation by a general perspective of tensor methods. Finally, within our framework, we present efficient implementation and total complexity analysis of the inexact second-order scheme $(p = 2)$, called Contracting Newton method. It can be seen as a proper implementation of the trust-region idea. Preliminary numerical results confirm its good practical performance both in the number of iterations, and in computational time.

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arXiv2020

Stochastic Subspace Cubic Newton Method

In this paper, we propose a new randomized second-order optimization algorithm---Stochastic Subspace Cubic Newton (SSCN)---for minimizing a high dimensional convex function $f$. Our method can be seen both as a {\em stochastic} extension of the cubically-regularized Newton method of Nesterov and Polyak (2006), and a {\em second-order} enhancement of stochastic subspace descent of Kozak et al. (2019). We prove that as we vary the minibatch size, the global convergence rate of SSCN interpolates between the rate of stochastic coordinate descent (CD) and the rate of cubic regularized Newton, thus giving new insights into the connection between first and second-order methods. Remarkably, the local convergence rate of SSCN matches the rate of stochastic subspace descent applied to the problem of minimizing the quadratic function $\frac12 (x-x^*)^\top \nabla^2f(x^*)(x-x^*)$, where $x^*$ is the minimizer of $f$, and hence depends on the properties of $f$ at the optimum only. Our numerical experiments show that SSCN outperforms non-accelerated first-order CD algorithms while being competitive to their accelerated variants.

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arXiv2018

Randomized Block Cubic Newton Method

We study the problem of minimizing the sum of three convex functions: a differentiable, twice-differentiable and a non-smooth term in a high dimensional setting. To this effect we propose and analyze a randomized block cubic Newton (RBCN) method, which in each iteration builds a model of the objective function formed as the sum of the natural models of its three components: a linear model with a quadratic regularizer for the differentiable term, a quadratic model with a cubic regularizer for the twice differentiable term, and perfect (proximal) model for the nonsmooth term. Our method in each iteration minimizes the model over a random subset of blocks of the search variable. RBCN is the first algorithm with these properties, generalizing several existing methods, matching the best known bounds in all special cases. We establish ${\cal O}(1/ε)$, ${\cal O}(1/\sqrtε)$ and ${\cal O}(\log (1/ε))$ rates under different assumptions on the component functions. Lastly, we show numerically that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art on a variety of machine learning problems, including cubically regularized least-squares, logistic regression with constraints, and Poisson regression.

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