IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cor/louvco/2015013.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Smooth Strongly Convex Interpolation and Exact Worst-case Performance of First-order Methods

Author

Listed:
  • Taylor, A.

    (Université catholique de Louvain, CORE, Belgium)

  • Hendrickx, J.

    (Université catholique de Louvain, CORE, Belgium)

  • Glineur, F.

    (Université catholique de Louvain, CORE, Belgium)

Abstract

We show that the exact worst-case performance of fixed-step first-order methods for smooth (possibly strongly) convex functions can be obtained by solving convex programs. Finding the worst-case performance of a black-box first-order method is formulated as an optimization problem over a set of smooth (strongly) convex functions and initial conditions. We develop closed-form necessary and sufficient conditions for smooth (strongly) convex interpolation, which provide a finite representation for those functions. This allows us to reformulate the worst-case performance estimation problem as an equivalent finite dimension-independent semidefinite optimization problem, whose exact solution can be recovered up to numerical precision. Optimal solutions to this performance estimation problem provide both worst-case performance bounds and explicit functions matching them, as our smooth (strongly) convex interpolation procedure is constructive. Our works build on those of Drori and Teboulle in [8] who introduced and solved relaxations of the performance estimation problem for smooth convex functions. We apply our approach to different fixed-step first-order methods with several performance criteria, including objective function accuracy and residual gradient norm. We conjecture several numerically supported worst-case bounds on the performance of the gradient, fast gradient and optimized fixed-step methods, both in the smooth convex and the smooth strongly convex cases, and deduce tight estimates of the optimal step size for the gradient method.

Suggested Citation

  • Taylor, A. & Hendrickx, J. & Glineur, F., 2015. "Smooth Strongly Convex Interpolation and Exact Worst-case Performance of First-order Methods," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2015013, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    • Handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2015013
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://sites.uclouvain.be/core/publications/coredp/coredp2015.html
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. DEVOLDER, Olivier & GLINEUR, François & NESTEROV, Yurii, 2012. "Double smoothing technique for large-scale linearly constrained convex optimization," LIDAM Reprints CORE 2423, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. TAYLOR, Adrien B. & HENDRICKX, Julien M. & François GLINEUR, 2016. "Exact worst-case performance of first-order methods for composite convex optimization," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2016052, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    2. Sandra S. Y. Tan & Antonios Varvitsiotis & Vincent Y. F. Tan, 2021. "Analysis of Optimization Algorithms via Sum-of-Squares," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 190(1), pages 56-81, July.
    3. Hadi Abbaszadehpeivasti & Etienne Klerk & Moslem Zamani, 2024. "On the Rate of Convergence of the Difference-of-Convex Algorithm (DCA)," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 202(1), pages 475-496, July.
    4. Vrins, F. & Jeanblanc, M., 2015. "The [phi]-Martingale," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2015022, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    5. Ernest K. Ryu & Bằng Công Vũ, 2020. "Finding the Forward-Douglas–Rachford-Forward Method," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 184(3), pages 858-876, March.
    6. Adrien B. Taylor & Julien M. Hendrickx & François Glineur, 2018. "Exact Worst-Case Convergence Rates of the Proximal Gradient Method for Composite Convex Minimization," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 178(2), pages 455-476, August.
    7. Guoyong Gu & Junfeng Yang, 2024. "Tight Ergodic Sublinear Convergence Rate of the Relaxed Proximal Point Algorithm for Monotone Variational Inequalities," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 202(1), pages 373-387, July.
    8. Rieger, Janosch & Tam, Matthew K., 2020. "Backward-Forward-Reflected-Backward Splitting for Three Operator Monotone Inclusions," Applied Mathematics and Computation, Elsevier, vol. 381(C).
    9. Donghwan Kim & Jeffrey A. Fessler, 2021. "Optimizing the Efficiency of First-Order Methods for Decreasing the Gradient of Smooth Convex Functions," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 188(1), pages 192-219, January.
    10. Abbaszadehpeivasti, Hadi & de Klerk, Etienne & Zamani, Moslem, 2022. "The exact worst-case convergence rate of the gradient method with fixed step lengths for L-smooth functions," Other publications TiSEM 061688c6-f97c-4024-bb5b-1, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. TAYLOR, Adrien B. & HENDRICKX, Julien M. & François GLINEUR, 2016. "Exact worst-case performance of first-order methods for composite convex optimization," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2016052, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    2. Radu Boţ & Christopher Hendrich, 2013. "A double smoothing technique for solving unconstrained nondifferentiable convex optimization problems," Computational Optimization and Applications, Springer, vol. 54(2), pages 239-262, March.
    3. Olga Yufereva & Michael Persiianov & Pavel Dvurechensky & Alexander Gasnikov & Dmitry Kovalev, 2024. "Decentralized convex optimization on time-varying networks with application to Wasserstein barycenters," Computational Management Science, Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 1-31, June.
    4. Pavel Dvurechensky & Yurii Nesterov & Vladimir Spokoiny, 2015. "Primal-Dual Methods for Solving Infinite-Dimensional Games," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 166(1), pages 23-51, July.
    5. Stefan Richter & Colin Jones & Manfred Morari, 2013. "Certification aspects of the fast gradient method for solving the dual of parametric convex programs," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 77(3), pages 305-321, June.
    6. Quoc Tran-Dinh, 2017. "Adaptive smoothing algorithms for nonsmooth composite convex minimization," Computational Optimization and Applications, Springer, vol. 66(3), pages 425-451, April.
    7. Jueyou Li & Guo Chen & Zhaoyang Dong & Zhiyou Wu, 2016. "A fast dual proximal-gradient method for separable convex optimization with linear coupled constraints," Computational Optimization and Applications, Springer, vol. 64(3), pages 671-697, July.
    8. DEVOLDER, Olivier & GLINEUR, François & NESTEROV, Yurii, 2013. "Intermediate gradient methods for smooth convex problems with inexact oracle," LIDAM Discussion Papers CORE 2013017, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    9. Masoud Ahookhosh & Arnold Neumaier, 2018. "Solving structured nonsmooth convex optimization with complexity $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-1/2})$$ O ( ε - 1 / 2 )," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 26(1), pages 110-145, April.
    10. Radu Boţ & Christopher Hendrich, 2015. "A variable smoothing algorithm for solving convex optimization problems," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 23(1), pages 124-150, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cor:louvco:2015013. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Alain GILLIS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/coreebe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.