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In this paper, we adopt the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) to solve convex quadratic second-order cone programming problems (SOCPs). Fruitful results on the efficiency of the ALM have been established in the literature. Recently, it has been shown in [Cui, Sun, and Toh, Math. Program., 178 (2019), pp. 381-415] that if the quadratic growth condition holds at an optimal solution for the dual problem, then the KKT residual converges to zero R-superlinearly when the ALM is applied to the primal problem. Moreover, Cui, Ding, and Zhao [SIAM J. 0ptim., 27 (2017), pp. 2332-2355] provided sufficient conditions for the quadratic growth condition to hold under the metric subregularity and bounded linear regularity conditions for solving composite matrix optimization problems involving spectral functions. Here, we adopt these recent ideas to analyze the convergence properties of the ALM when applied to SOCPs. To the best of our knowledge, no similar work has been done for SOCPs so far. In our paper, we first provide sufficient conditions to ensure the quadratic growth condition for SOCPs. With these elegant theoretical guarantees, we then design an SOCP solver and apply it to solve various classes of SOCPs, such as minimal enclosing ball problems, classical trust-region subproblems, square-root Lasso problems, and DIMACS Challenge problems. Numerical results show that the proposed ALM based solver is efficient and robust compared to the existing highly developed solvers, such as Mosek and SDPT3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, through an intuitive vanil la proximal method perspective, we derive a concise unified acceleration framework (UAF) for minimizing a convex function that has H\"older continuous derivatives with respect to general (non-Euclidean) norms. The UAF reconciles two different high-order acceleration approaches, one by Nesterov [Math. Program., 112 (2008), pp. 159-181] and one by Monteiro and Svaiter [SIAM J. Optim., 23 (2013), pp. 1092-1125]. As a result, the UAF unifies the high-order acceleration instances of the two approaches by only two problem-related parameters and two additional parameters for framework design. Meanwhile, the UAF (and its analysis) is the first approach to make high-order methods applicable for high-order smoothness conditions with respect to non-Euclidean norms. Furthermore, the UAF is the first approach that can match the existing lower bound of iteration complexity for minimizing a convex function with H\"older continuous derivatives. For practical implementation, we introduce a new and effective heuristic that significantly simplifies the binary search procedure required by the framework. We use experiments on logistic regression to verify the effectiveness of the heuristic. Finally, the UAF is proposed directly in the general composite convex setting and shows that the existing high-order algorithms can be naturally extended to the general composite convex setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]