arXiv subjects

Pierre-Louis Poirion

Publications and source records attributed to Pierre-Louis Poirion.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Gradient Descent with Stochastic Subspaces via Persistence of Memory

Stochastic subspace methods have gained popularity as gradient descent based techniques for large scale optimisation problems, especially in distributed settings. In this paper, we introduce the technique of "persistence of memory" to greatly extend and improve the random subspace methods. To this end, we leverage a vector that is only weakly correlated with the gradient in order to provide a guiding structure to the generative process of the random subspace along which the descent is going to take place. This guidance vector may be fixed for a large number of iterations, only to be refreshed at wide intervals (on whose size we can provide guarantees in terms of problem parameters). In important machine learning settings, such as optimisation problems embodying sparsity or a minibatch structure, we show that the guidance vector can be obtained in an effective and computationally inexpensive manner by leveraging the structured properties of the problem. En route, we establish to our knowledge the first theoretical analysis of classical SSD methods for sparse functions. In a local neighbourhood of the optimum, we demonstrate an alignment phenomenon of our gradient estimates with a low-lying eigenvector of the Hessian, allowing a once-for-all computation of the guidance vector which renders the method computationally favourable even in scenarios with unstructured objectives.

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arXiv2026

Random-Subspace Frank--Wolfe over Strongly Convex Sets

Frank--Wolfe methods avoid projections, but over curved feasible regions the full-space linear minimization oracle (LMO) can itself become the computational bottleneck. We introduce random-subspace Frank--Wolfe (RSFW), the first Frank--Wolfe framework, to our knowledge, that replaces the ambient LMO by exact LMOs over random low-dimensional affine sections of a general feasible set, while preserving feasibility in the original space. For smooth convex objectives over compact strongly convex feasible sets, we prove a dimension-explicit approximate-oracle inequality and derive the standard $O(1/k)$ open-loop rate, with high-probability and almost-sure counterparts. Under short steps and a gradient lower bound, the same geometric control yields linear convergence, and we extend the sublinear theory to finite-sum stochastic gradients. We also show that random sections can improve the local curvature model controlling short steps: for smooth objectives, the quadratic model along a sampled section is governed by the compressed Hessian, yielding computable $d\times d$ curvature constants for quadratic objectives over balls and ellipsoids. These results provide a geometric theory of oracle-side randomization in projection-free optimization.

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arXiv2026

Randomized Subspace Nesterov Accelerated Gradient

Randomized-subspace methods reduce the cost of first-order optimization by using only low-dimensional projected-gradient information, a feature that is attractive in forward-mode automatic differentiation and communication-limited settings. While Nesterov acceleration is well understood for full-gradient and coordinate-based methods, obtaining accelerated methods for general subspace sketches that use only projected-gradient information and can improve over full-dimensional Nesterov acceleration in oracle complexity is technically nontrivial. We develop randomized-subspace Nesterov accelerated gradient methods for smooth convex and smooth strongly convex optimization under matrix smoothness and generic sketch moment assumptions. The key technical ingredient is a three-sequence formulation tailored to matrix smoothness, which recovers the corresponding classical Nesterov methods in the full-dimensional case. The resulting theory establishes accelerated oracle-complexity guarantees and makes explicit how matrix smoothness and the sketch distribution enter the complexity. It also provides a unified basis for comparing sketch families and identifying when randomized-subspace acceleration improves over full-dimensional Nesterov acceleration in oracle complexity.

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arXiv2026

Inexact subgradient algorithm with a non-asymptotic convergence guarantee for copositive programming problems

In this paper, we propose a subgradient algorithm with a non-asymptotic convergence guarantee to solve copositive programming problems. The subproblem to be solved at each iteration is a standard quadratic programming problem, which is NP-hard in general. However, the proposed algorithm allows this subproblem to be solved inexactly. For a prescribed accuracy $ε> 0$ for both the objective function and the constraint arising from the copositivity condition, the proposed algorithm yields an approximate solution after $O(ε^{-2})$ iterations, even when the subproblems are solved inexactly. We also discuss exact and inexact approaches for solving standard quadratic programming problems and compare their performance through numerical experiments. In addition, we apply the proposed algorithm to the problem of testing complete positivity of a matrix and derive a sufficient condition for certifying that a matrix is not completely positive. Experimental results demonstrate that we can detect the lack of complete positivity in various doubly nonnegative matrices that are not completely positive.

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arXiv2026

Fairness in Robust Unit Commitment Problem Considering Suppression of Renewable Energy

Power company operators make power generation plans one day in advance, in what is known as the Unit Commitment (UC) problem. UC is exposed to uncertainties, such as unknown electricity load and disturbances caused by renewable energy sources, especially PVs. In previous research, we proposed the Renewable Energy Robust Optimization Problem (RE-RP), which solves these uncertainties by considering suppression. In this paper, we propose a new model called RE-RP with fairness (RE-RPfair), which aims to achieve fair allocation among PVs allocation. This model is an expansion of the original RE-RP, and we prove its effectiveness through simulation. To measure the degree of fairness, we use the Gini Index, which is well-known in social science.

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arXiv2026

Convergence Analysis of Randomized Subspace Normalized SGD under Heavy-Tailed Noise

Randomized subspace methods reduce per-iteration cost; however, in nonconvex optimization, most analyses are expectation-based, and high-probability bounds remain scarce even under sub-Gaussian noise. We first prove that randomized subspace SGD (RS-SGD) admits a high-probability convergence bound under sub-Gaussian noise, achieving the same order of oracle complexity as prior in-expectation results. Motivated by the prevalence of heavy-tailed gradients in modern machine learning, we then propose randomized subspace normalized SGD (RS-NSGD), which integrates direction normalization into subspace updates. Assuming the noise has bounded $p$-th moments, we establish both in-expectation and high-probability convergence guarantees, and show that RS-NSGD can achieve better oracle complexity than full-dimensional normalized SGD.

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arXiv2025

Theoretical analysis of the randomized subspace regularized Newton method for non-convex optimization

While there already exist randomized subspace Newton methods that restrict the search direction to a random subspace for a convex function, we propose a randomized subspace regularized Newton method for a non-convex function {and more generally we investigate thoroughly the local convergence rate of the randomized subspace Newton method}. In our proposed algorithm using a modified Hessian of the function restricted to some random subspace, with high probability, the function value decreases even when the objective function is non-convex. In this paper, we show that our method has global convergence under appropriate assumptions and its convergence rate is the same as that of the full regularized Newton method. %We also prove that Furthermore, we can obtain a local linear convergence rate under some additional assumptions, and prove that this rate is the best we can hope, in general, when using random subspace. We furthermore prove that if the Hessian at the local optimum is rank defficient then superlienar convergence holds.

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arXiv2025

Efficient Optimization with Orthogonality Constraint: a Randomized Riemannian Submanifold Method

Optimization with orthogonality constraints frequently arises in various fields such as machine learning. Riemannian optimization offers a powerful framework for solving these problems by equipping the constraint set with a Riemannian manifold structure and performing optimization intrinsically on the manifold. This approach typically involves computing a search direction in the tangent space and updating variables via a retraction operation. However, as the size of the variables increases, the computational cost of the retraction can become prohibitively high, limiting the applicability of Riemannian optimization to large-scale problems. To address this challenge and enhance scalability, we propose a novel approach that restricts each update on a random submanifold, thereby significantly reducing the per-iteration complexity. We introduce two sampling strategies for selecting the random submanifolds and theoretically analyze the convergence of the proposed methods. We provide convergence results for general nonconvex functions and functions that satisfy Riemannian Polyak-Lojasiewicz condition as well as for stochastic optimization settings. Additionally, we demonstrate how our approach can be generalized to quotient manifolds derived from the orthogonal manifold. Extensive experiments verify the benefits of the proposed method, across a wide variety of problems.

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arXiv2025

Improving Convergence Guarantees of Random Subspace Second-order Algorithm for Nonconvex Optimization

In recent years, random subspace methods have been actively studied for large-dimensional nonconvex problems. Recent subspace methods have improved theoretical guarantees such as iteration complexity and local convergence rate while reducing computational costs by deriving descent directions in randomly selected low-dimensional subspaces. This paper proposes the Random Subspace Homogenized Trust Region (RSHTR) method with the best theoretical guarantees among random subspace algorithms for nonconvex optimization. RSHTR achieves an $\varepsilon$-approximate first-order stationary point in $O(\varepsilon^{-3/2})$ iterations, converging locally at a linear rate. Furthermore, under rank-deficient conditions, RSHTR satisfies $\varepsilon$-approximate second-order necessary conditions in $O(\varepsilon^{-3/2})$ iterations and exhibits a local quadratic convergence. Experiments on real-world datasets verify the benefits of RSHTR.

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arXiv2024

Zeroth-order Random Subspace Algorithm for Non-smooth Convex Optimization

Zeroth-order optimization, which does not use derivative information, is one of the significant research areas in the field of mathematical optimization and machine learning. Although various studies have explored zeroth-order algorithms, one of the theoretical limitations is that oracle complexity depends on the dimension, i.e., on the number of variables, of the optimization problem. In this paper, to reduce the dependency of the dimension in oracle complexity, we propose a zeroth-order random subspace algorithm by combining a gradient-free algorithm (specifically, Gaussian randomized smoothing with central differences) with random projection. We derive the worst-case oracle complexity of our proposed method in non-smooth and convex settings; {\color{black} it is equivalent to standard results for full-dimensional non-smooth convex algorithms. Furthermore,} we prove that ours also has a local convergence rate independent of the original dimension under additional assumptions. In addition to the theoretical results, numerical experiments show that when an objective function has a specific structure, the proposed method can become experimentally more efficient due to random projection.

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arXiv2024

Sparse Sub-gaussian Random Projections for Semidefinite Programming Relaxations

Random projection, a dimensionality reduction technique, has been found useful in recent years for reducing the size of optimization problems. In this paper, we explore the use of sparse sub-gaussian random projections to approximate semidefinite programming (SDP) problems by reducing the size of matrix variables, thereby solving the original problem with much less computational effort. We provide some theoretical bounds on the quality of the projection in terms of feasibility and optimality that explicitly depend on the sparsity parameter of the projector. We investigate the performance of the approach for semidefinite relaxations appearing in polynomial optimization, with a focus on combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, we apply our method to the semidefinite relaxations of MAXCUT and MAX-2-SAT. We show that for large unweighted graphs, we can obtain a good bound by solving a projection of the semidefinite relaxation of MAXCUT. We also explore how to apply our method to find the stability number of four classes of imperfect graphs by solving a projection of the second level of the Lasserre Hierarchy. Overall, our computational experiments show that semidefinite programming problems appearing as relaxations of combinatorial optimization problems can be approximately solved using random projections as long as the number of constraints is not too large.

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arXiv2024

Subspace Quasi-Newton Method with Gradient Approximation

In recent years, various subspace algorithms have been developed to handle large-scale optimization problems. Although existing subspace Newton methods require fewer iterations to converge in practice, the matrix operations and full gradient computation are bottlenecks when dealing with large-scale problems. %In this study, We propose a subspace quasi-Newton method that is restricted to a deterministic-subspace together with a gradient approximation based on random matrix theory. Our method does not require full gradients, let alone Hessian matrices. Yet, it achieves the same order of the worst-case iteration complexities in average for convex and nonconvex cases, compared to existing subspace methods. In numerical experiments, we confirm the superiority of our algorithm in terms of computation time.

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arXiv2023

Randomized subspace gradient method for constrained optimization

We propose randomized subspace gradient methods for high-dimensional constrained optimization. While there have been similarly purposed studies on unconstrained optimization problems, there have been few on constrained optimization problems due to the difficulty of handling constraints. Our algorithms project gradient vectors onto a subspace that is a random projection of the subspace spanned by the gradients of active constraints. We determine the worst-case iteration complexity under linear and nonlinear settings and theoretically confirm that our algorithms can take a larger step size than their deterministic version. From the advantages of taking longer step and randomized subspace gradients, we show that our algorithms are especially efficient in view of time complexity when gradients cannot be obtained easily. Numerical experiments show that they tend to find better solutions because of the randomness of their subspace selection. Furthermore, they performs well in cases where gradients could not be obtained directly, and instead, gradients are obtained using directional derivatives.

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arXiv2023

The Maximum Matrix Contraction Problem

In this paper, we introduce the Maximum Matrix Contraction problem, where we aim to contract as much as possible a binary matrix in order to maximize its density. We study the complexity and the polynomial approximability of the problem. Especially, we prove this problem to be NP-Complete and that every algorithm solving this problem is at most a $2\sqrt{n}$-approximation algorithm where n is the number of ones in the matrix. We then focus on efficient algorithms to solve the problem: an integer linear program and three heuristics.

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arXiv2023

Random projection of Linear and Semidefinite problem with linear inequalities

The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma states that there exist linear maps that project a set of points of a vector space into a space of much lower dimension such that the Euclidean distance between these points is approximately preserved. This lemma has been previously used to prove that we can randomly aggregate, using a random matrix whose entries are drawn from a zero-mean sub-Gaussian distribution, the equality constraints of an Linear Program (LP) while preserving approximately the value of the problem. In this paper we extend these results to the inequality case by introducing a random matrix with non-negative entries that allows to randomly aggregate inequality constraints of an LP while preserving approximately the value of the problem. By duality, the approach we propose allows to reduce both the number of constraints and the dimension of the problem while obtaining some theoretical guarantees on the optimal value. We will also show an extension of our results to certain semidefinite programming instances.

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arXiv2021

Convexification with bounded gap for randomly projected quadratic optimization

Random projection techniques based on Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma are used for randomly aggregating the constraints or variables of optimization problems while approximately preserving their optimal values, that leads to smaller-scale optimization problems. D'Ambrosio et al. have applied random projection to a quadratic optimization problem so as to decrease the number of decision variables. Although the problem size becomes smaller, the projected problem will also almost surely be non-convex if the original problem is non-convex, and hence will be hard to solve. In this paper, by focusing on the fact that the level of the non-convexity of a non-convex quadratic optimization problem can be alleviated by random projection, we find an approximate global optimal value of the problem by attributing it to a convex problem with smaller size. To the best of our knowledge, our paper is the first to use random projection for convexification of non-convex optimization problems. We evaluate the approximation error between optimum values of a non-convex optimization problem and its convexified randomly projected problem.

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arXiv2021

Random projections for conic programs

We discuss the application of random projections to conic programming: notably linear, second-order and semidefinite programs. We prove general approximation results on feasibility and optimality using the framework of formally real Jordan algebras. We then discuss some computational experiments on randomly generated semidefinite programs in order to illustrate the practical applicability of our ideas

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arXiv2018

Formulations for designing robust networks. An application to wind power collection

We are interested in the design of survivable capacitated rooted Steiner networks. Given a graph G = (V, E), capacity and cost functions on E, a root r, a subset T of V of terminals and an integer k, we search for a minimum cost subset E $\subset$ E, covering T and r, such that the network induced by E is k-survivable: after the removal of any k edges, there still exists a feasible flow from r to T. We also consider the possibility of protecting a given number of edges. We propose three different formulations: a cut-set, a flow and a bi-level formulation where the second-level is a min-max problem (with an attacker and a defender). We propose algorithms for each problem formulation and compare their efficiency.

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