Non-convex optimization problems arise from various areas in science and engineering. Although many numerical methods and theories have been developed for unconstrained non-convex problems, the parallel development for constrained non-convex problems remains limited. That restricts the practices of mathematical modeling and quantitative decision making in many disciplines. In this paper, an inexact proximal-point penalty method is proposed for constrained optimization problems where both the objective function and the constraint can be non-convex. The proposed method approximately solves a sequence of subproblems, each of which is formed by adding to the original objective function a proximal term and quadratic penalty terms associated to the constraint functions. Under a weak-convexity assumption, each subproblem is made strongly convex and can be solved effectively to a required accuracy by an optimal gradient-type method. The theoretical property of the proposed method is analyzed in two different cases. In the first case, the objective function is non-convex but the constraint functions are assumed to be convex, while in the second case, both the objective function and the constraint are non-convex. For both cases, we give the complexity results in terms of the number of function value and gradient evaluations to produce near-stationary points. Due to the different structures, different definitions of near-stationary points are given for the two cases. The complexity for producing a nearly @math -stationary point is @math for the first case while it becomes @math for the second case.
In this paper, we analyze the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing a nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth objective function, ( (x_0, ,x_p,y) ), subject to coupled linear equality constraints. Our ADMM updates each of the primal variables (x_0, ,x_p,y ), followed by updating the dual variable. We separate the variable y from (x_i )’s as it has a special role in our analysis. The developed convergence guarantee covers a variety of nonconvex functions such as piecewise linear functions, ( _q ) quasi-norm, Schatten-q quasi-norm ( (0<q<1 )), minimax concave penalty (MCP), and smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty. It also allows nonconvex constraints such as compact manifolds (e.g., spherical, Stiefel, and Grassman manifolds) and linear complementarity constraints. Also, the (x_0 )-block can be almost any lower semi-continuous function. By applying our analysis, we show, for the first time, that several ADMM algorithms applied to solve nonconvex models in statistical learning, optimization on manifold, and matrix decomposition are guaranteed to converge. Our results provide sufficient conditions for ADMM to converge on (convex or nonconvex) monotropic programs with three or more blocks, as they are special cases of our model. ADMM has been regarded as a variant to the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM). We present a simple example to illustrate how ADMM converges but ALM diverges with bounded penalty parameter ( ). Indicated by this example and other analysis in this paper, ADMM might be a better choice than ALM for some nonconvex nonsmooth problems, because ADMM is not only easier to implement, it is also more likely to converge for the concerned scenarios.  The alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMM) is one of the most powerful and successful methods for solving various composite problems. The convergence of the conventional ADMM (i.e., 2-block) for convex objective functions has been stated for a long time, and its convergence for nonconvex objective functions has, however, been established very recently. The multi-block ADMM, a natural extension of ADMM, is a widely used scheme and has also been found very useful in solving various nonconvex optimization problems. It is thus expected to establish the convergence of the multi-block ADMM under nonconvex frameworks. In this paper, we first justify the convergence of 3-block Bregman ADMM. We next extend these results to the N-block case (N ≥ 3), which underlines the feasibility of multi-block ADMM applications in nonconvex settings. Finally, we present a simulation study and a real-world application to support the correctness of the obtained theoretical assertions. For optimization problems with nonlinear constraints, linearly constrained Lagrangian (LCL) methods solve a sequence of subproblems of the form "minimize an augmented Lagrangian function subject to linearized constraints." Such methods converge rapidly near a solution but may not be reliable from arbitrary starting points. Nevertheless, the well-known software package MINOS has proved effective on many large problems. Its success motivates us to derive a related LCL algorithm that possesses three important properties: it is globally convergent, the subproblem constraints are always feasible, and the subproblems may be solved inexactly. The new algorithm has been implemented in MATLAB, with an option to use either MINOS or SNOPT (Fortran codes) to solve the linearly constrained subproblems. Only first derivatives are required. We present numerical results on a subset of the COPS, HS, and CUTE test problems, which include many large examples. The results demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of the stabilized LCL procedure. We propose a practical inexact augmented Lagrangian method (iALM) for nonconvex problems with nonlinear constraints. We characterize the total computational complexity of our method subject to a verifiable geometric condition, which is closely related to the Polyak-Lojasiewicz and Mangasarian-Fromovitz conditions. In particular, when a first-order solver is used for the inner iterates, we prove that iALM finds a first-order stationary point with @math calls to the first-order oracle. If, in addition, the problem is smooth and a second-order solver is used for the inner iterates, iALM finds a second-order stationary point with @math calls to the second-order oracle. These complexity results match the known theoretical results in the literature. We also provide strong numerical evidence on large-scale machine learning problems, including the Burer-Monteiro factorization of semidefinite programs, and a novel nonconvex relaxation of the standard basis pursuit template. For these examples, we also show how to verify our geometric condition. Augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) has been popularly used for solving constrained optimization problems. Practically, subproblems for updating primal variables in the framework of ALM usually can only be solved inexactly. The convergence and local convergence speed of ALM have been extensively studied. However, the global convergence rate of the inexact ALM is still open for problems with nonlinear inequality constraints. In this paper, we work on general convex programs with both equality and inequality constraints. For these problems, we establish the global convergence rate of the inexact ALM and estimate its iteration complexity in terms of the number of gradient evaluations to produce a primal and or primal-dual solution with a specified accuracy. We first establish an ergodic convergence rate result of the inexact ALM that uses constant penalty parameters or geometrically increasing penalty parameters. Based on the convergence rate result, we then apply Nesterov’s optimal first-order method on each primal subproblem and estimate the iteration complexity of the inexact ALM. We show that if the objective is convex, then (O( ^ -1 ) ) gradient evaluations are sufficient to guarantee a primal ( )-solution in terms of both primal objective and feasibility violation. If the objective is strongly convex, the result can be improved to (O( ^ - 1 2 | |) ). To produce a primal-dual ( )-solution, more gradient evaluations are needed for convex case, and the number is (O( ^ - 4 3 ) ), while for strongly convex case, the number is still (O( ^ - 1 2 | |) ). Finally, we establish a nonergodic convergence rate result of the inexact ALM that uses geometrically increasing penalty parameters. This result is established only for the primal problem. We show that the nonergodic iteration complexity result is in the same order as that for the ergodic result. Numerical experiments on quadratically constrained quadratic programming are conducted to compare the performance of the inexact ALM with different settings. The main purpose of this paper is to suggest a method for finding the minimum of a functionf(x) subject to the constraintg(x)=0. The method consists of replacingf byF=f+λg+1 2cg2, wherec is a suitably large constant, and computing the appropriate value of the Lagrange multiplier. Only the simplest algorithm is presented. The remaining part of the paper is devoted to a survey of known methods for finding unconstrained minima, with special emphasis on the various gradient techniques that are available. This includes Newton's method and the method of conjugate gradients. First-order methods have been popularly used for solving large-scale problems. However, many existing works only consider unconstrained problems or those with simple constraint. In this paper, we develop two first-order methods for constrained convex programs, for which the constraint set is represented by affine equations and smooth nonlinear inequalities. Both methods are based on the classic augmented Lagrangian function. They update the multipliers in the same way as the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM) but employ different primal variable updates. The first method, at each iteration, performs a single proximal gradient step to the primal variable, and the second method is a block update version of the first one. For the first method, we establish its global iterate convergence as well as global sublinear and local linear convergence, and for the second method, we show a global sublinear convergence result in expectation. Numerical experiments are carried out on the basis pursuit denoising and a convex quadratically constrained quadratic program to show the empirical performance of the proposed methods. Their numerical behaviors closely match the established theoretical results. The theory of the proximal point algorithm for maximal monotone operators is applied to three algorithms for solving convex programs, one of which has not previously been formulated. Rate-of-convergence results for the “method of multipliers,” of the strong sort already known, are derived in a generalized form relevant also to problems beyond the compass of the standard second-order conditions for oplimality. The new algorithm, the “proximal method of multipliers,” is shown to have much the same convergence properties, but with some potential advantages. In this paper we study the worst-case complexity of an inexact Augmented Lagrangian method for nonconvex inequality-constrained problems. Assuming that the penalty parameters are bounded, we prove a complexity bound of @math iterations for the referred algorithm generate an @math -approximate KKT point, for @math . When the penalty parameters are unbounded, we prove an iteration complexity bound of @math , where @math controls the rate of increase of the penalty parameters. For linearly constrained problems, these bounds yield to evaluation complexity bounds of @math and @math , respectively, when suitable @math -order methods ( @math ) are used to approximately solve the unconstrained subproblems at each iteration of our Augmented Lagrangian scheme. In this paper, we propose a new decomposition approach named the proximal primal dual algorithm (Prox-PDA) for smooth nonconvex linearly constrained optimization problems. The proposed approach is primal-dual based, where the primal step minimizes certain approximation of the augmented Lagrangian of the problem, and the dual step performs an approximate dual ascent. The approximation used in the primal step is able to decompose the variable blocks, making it possible to obtain simple subproblems by leveraging the problem structures. Theoretically, we show that whenever the penalty parameter in the augmented Lagrangian is larger than a given threshold, the Prox-PDA converges to the set of stationary solutions, globally and in a sublinear manner (i.e., certain measure of stationarity decreases in the rate of @math , where @math is the iteration counter). Interestingly, when applying a variant of the Prox-PDA to the problem of distributed nonconvex optimization (over a connected undirected graph), the resulting algorithm coincides with the popular EXTRA algorithm [ 2014], which is only known to work in convex cases. Our analysis implies that EXTRA and its variants converge globally sublinearly to stationary solutions of certain nonconvex distributed optimization problem. There are many possible extensions of the Prox-PDA, and we present one particular extension to certain nonconvex distributed matrix factorization problem. Stochastic gradient (SG) method has been popularly applied to solve optimization problems with objective that is stochastic or an average of many functions. Most existing works on SG assume that the underlying problem is unconstrained or has an easy-to-project constraint set. In this paper, we consider problems that have a stochastic objective and also many functional constraints. For such problems, it could be extremely expensive to project a point to the feasible set, or even compute subgradient and or function value of all constraint functions. To find solutions of these problems, we propose a novel SG method based on the augmented Lagrangian function. Within every iteration, it inquires a stochastic subgradient of the objective, a subgradient and function value of one randomly sampled constraint function, and function value of another sampled constraint function. Hence, the per-iteration complexity is low. We establish its convergence rate for convex and also strongly convex problems. It can achieve the optimal @math convergence rate for convex case and nearly optimal @math rate for strongly convex case. Numerical experiments on quadratically constrained quadratic programming are conducted to demonstrate its efficiency. This paper considers a special but broad class of convex programming problems whose feasible region is a simple compact convex set intersected with the inverse image of a closed convex cone under an affine transformation. It studies the computational complexity of quadratic penalty based methods for solving the above class of problems. An iteration of these methods, which is simply an iteration of Nesterov’s optimal method (or one of its variants) for approximately solving a smooth penalization subproblem, consists of one or two projections onto the simple convex set. Iteration-complexity bounds expressed in terms of the latter type of iterations are derived for two quadratic penalty based variants, namely: one which applies the quadratic penalty method directly to the original problem and another one which applies the latter method to a perturbation of the original problem obtained by adding a small quadratic term to its objective function.  In this paper, we consider augmented Lagrangian AL algorithms for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems that execute adaptive strategies for updating the penalty parameter. Our work is motivated by the recently proposed adaptive AL trust region method by [An adaptive augmented Lagrangian method for large-scale constrained optimization, Math. Program. 152 2015, pp. 201–245.]. The first focal point of this paper is a new variant of the approach that employs a line search rather than a trust region strategy, where a critical algorithmic feature for the line search strategy is the use of convexified piecewise quadratic models of the AL function for computing the search directions. We prove global convergence guarantees for our line search algorithm that are on par with those for the previously proposed trust region method. A second focal point of this paper is the practical performance of the line search and trust region algorithm variants in Matlab software, as well as that of an adaptive penalty parameter updating strategy incorporated into the Lancelot software. We test these methods on problems from the CUTEst and COPS collections, as well as on challenging test problems related to optimal power flow. Our numerical experience suggests that the adaptive algorithms outperform traditional AL methods in terms of efficiency and reliability. As with traditional AL algorithms, the adaptive methods are matrix-free and thus represent a viable option for solving large-scale problems. This paper establishes the iteration-complexity of a Jacobi-type non-Euclidean proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving multi-block linearly constrained nonconvex programs. The subproblems of this ADMM variant can be solved in parallel and hence the method has great potential to solve large scale multi-block linearly constrained nonconvex programs. Moreover, our analysis allows the Lagrange multiplier to be updated with a relaxation parameter in the interval (0, 2). We establish local convergence and rate of convergence of the classical augmented Lagrangian algorithm under the sole assumption that the dual starting point is close to a multiplier satisfying the second-order sufficient optimality condition. In particular, no constraint qualifications of any kind are needed. Previous literature on the subject required, in addition, the linear independence constraint qualification and either the strict complementarity assumption or a stronger version of the second-order sufficient condition. That said, the classical results allow the initial multiplier estimate to be far from the optimal one, at the expense of proportionally increasing the threshold value for the penalty parameters. Although our primary goal is to avoid constraint qualifications, if the stronger assumptions are introduced, then starting points far from the optimal multiplier are allowed within our analysis as well. Using only the second-order sufficient optimality condition, for penalty parameters large ... The alternating direction method with multipliers (ADMM) has been one of most powerful and successful methods for solving various convex or nonconvex composite problems that arise in the fields of image & signal processing and machine learning. In convex settings, numerous convergence results have been established for ADMM as well as its varieties. However, due to the absence of convexity, the convergence analysis of nonconvex ADMM is generally very difficult. In this paper we study the Bregman modification of ADMM (BADMM), which includes the conventional ADMM as a special case and often leads to an improvement of the performance of the algorithm. Under certain assumptions, we prove that the iterative sequence generated by BADMM converges to a stationary point of the associated augmented Lagrangian function. The obtained results underline the feasibility of ADMM in applications under nonconvex settings. In this paper we present a complete iteration complexity analysis of inexact first-order Lagrangian and penalty methods for solving cone-constrained convex problems that have or may not have optimal Lagrange multipliers that close the duality gap. We first assume the existence of optimal Lagrange multipliers and study primal–dual first-order methods based on inexact information and augmented Lagrangian smoothing or Nesterov-type smoothing. For inexact (fast) gradient augmented Lagrangian methods, we derive an overall computational complexity of O(1 ϵ) projections onto a simple primal set in order to attain an e-optimal solution of the conic convex problem. For the inexact fast gradient method combined with Nesterov-type smoothing, we derive computational complexity O(1 ϵ3 2) projections onto the same set. Then, we assume that optimal Lagrange multipliers might not exist for the cone-constrained convex problem, and analyse the fast gradient method for solving penalty reformulations of the problem. For the ... This paper establishes convergence rate bounds for a variant of the proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonconvex linearly constrained optimization problems. The variant of the proximal ADMM allows the inclusion of an over-relaxation stepsize parameter belonging to the interval @math . To the best of our knowledge, all related papers in the literature only consider the case where the over-relaxation parameter lies in the interval @math .