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Packing and covering semidefinite programs (SDPs) appear in natural relaxations of many combinatorial optimization problems as well as a number of other applications. Recently, several techniques were proposed, which utilize the particular structure of this class of problems, to obtain more efficient algorithms than those offered by general SDP solvers. For certain applications, such as those described in this paper, it may be desirable to obtain sparse dual solutions, i.e., those with support size (almost) independent of the number of primal constraints. In this paper, we give an algorithm that finds such solutions, which is an extension of a logarithmic-potential based algorithm of Grigoriadis et al. [SIAM J. Optim. 11 (2001), pp. 1081-1091] for packing/covering linear programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, in a series of papers [Y. Rahimi, C. Wang, H. Dong, and Y. Lou, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 41 (2019), pp. A3649-A3672; C. Wang, M. Tao, J. Nagy, and Y. Lou, SIAM J. Imaging Sci., 14 (2021), pp. 749-777; C. Wang, M. Yan, and Y. Lou, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., 68 (2020), pp. 2660-2669; P. Yin, E. Esser, and J. Xin, Commun. Inf. Syst., 14 (2014), pp. 87-109], the ratio of ℓ1 and ℓ2 norms was proposed as a sparsity inducing function for noiseless compressed sensing. In this paper, we further study properties of such model in the noiseless setting, and propose an algorithm for minimizing ℓ1/ℓ2 subject to noise in the measurements. Specifically, we show that the extended objective function (the sum of the objective and the indicator function of the constraint set) of the model in [Y. Rahimi, C. Wang, H. Dong, and Y. Lou, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 41 (2019), pp. A3649-A3672] satisfies the Kurdyka--Lojasiewicz (KL) property with exponent 1/2; this allows us to establish linear convergence of the algorithm proposed in [C. Wang, M. Yan, and Y. Lou, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., 68 (2020), pp. 2660-2669] (see equation 11) under mild assumptions. We next extend the ℓ1/ℓ2 model to handle compressed sensing problems with noise. We establish the solution existence for some of these models under the spherical section property [S. A. Vavasis, Derivation of Compressive Sensing Theorems from the Spherical Section Property, University of Waterloo, 2009; Y. Zhang, J. Oper. Res. Soc. China, 1 (2013), pp. 79-105] and extend the algorithm in [C. Wang, M. Yan, and Y. Lou, IEEE Trans. Signal Process., 68 (2020), pp. 2660-2669] (see equation 11) by incorporating moving-balls-approximation techniques [A. Auslender, R. Shefi, and M. Teboulle, SIAM J. Optim., 20 (2010), pp. 3232-3259] for solving these problems. We prove the subsequential convergence of our algorithm under mild conditions and establish global convergence of the whole sequence generated by our algorithm by imposing additional KL and differentiability assumptions on a specially constructed potential function. Finally, we perform numerical experiments on robust compressed sensing and basis pursuit denoising with residual error measured by \ell 2 norm or Lorentzian norm via solving the corresponding ℓ1/ℓ2 models by our algorithm. Our numerical simulations show that our algorithm is able to recover the original sparse vectors with reasonable accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study smooth stochastic multilevel composition optimization problems, where the objective function is a nested composition of T functions. We assume access to noisy evaluations of the functions and their gradients, through a stochastic first-order oracle. For solving this class of problems, we propose two algorithms using moving-average stochastic estimates, and analyze their convergence to an e-stationary point of the problem. We show that the first algorithm, which is a generalization of [S. Ghadimi, A. Ruszczynski, and M. Wang, SIAM J. Optim., 30 (2020), pp. 960-979] to the T level case, can achieve a sample complexity of OT(1/ε6) by using minibatches of samples in each iteration, where OT hides constants that depend on T. By modifying this algorithm using linearized stochastic estimates of the function values, we improve the sample complexity to OT(1/ε4). This modification not only removes the requirement of having a minibatch of samples in each iteration, but also makes the algorithm parameter-free and easy to implement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such an online algorithm designed for the (un)constrained multilevel setting obtains the same sample complexity of the smooth single-level setting, under standard assumptions (unbiasedness and boundedness of the second moments) on the stochastic first-order oracle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the iteration complexity of the optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA) method and the extragradient (EG) method for finding a saddle point of a convex-concave unconstrained min-max problem. To do so, we first show that both OGDA and EG can be interpreted as approximate variants of the proximal point method. This is similar to the approach taken in (A. Nemirovski (2004), SIAM J. Optim., 15, pp. 229-251) which analyzes EG as an approximation of the "conceptual mirror prox." In this paper, we highlight how gradients used in OGDA and EG try to approximate the gradient of the proximal point method. We then exploit this interpretation to show that both algorithms produce iterates that remain within a bounded set. We further show that the primal-dual gap of the averaged iterates generated by both of these algorithms converge with a rate of O(1/k). Our theoretical analysis is of interest as it provides the first convergence rate estimate for OGDA in the general convex-concave setting. Moreover, it provides a simple convergence analysis for the EG algorithm in terms of function value without using a compactness assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classical convergence analysis of quasi-Newton methods assumes that function and gradient evaluations are exact. In this paper, we consider the case when there are (bounded) errors in both computations and establish conditions under which a slight modification of the BFGS algorithm with an Armijo–Wolfe line search converges to a neighborhood of the solution that is determined by the size of the errors. One of our results is an extension of the analysis presented in [R. H. Byrd and J. Nocedal, SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 26 (1989), pp. 727–739], which establishes that, for strongly convex functions, a fraction of the BFGS iterates are good iterates. We present numerical results illustrating the performance of the new BFGS method in the presence of noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]