Adaptive restart of accelerated gradient methods under local quadratic growth condition

By analyzing accelerated proximal gradient methods under a local quadratic growth condition, we show that restarting these algorithms at any frequency gives a globally linearly convergent algorithm. This result was previously known only for long enough frequencies. Then as the rate of convergence depends on the match between the frequency and the quadratic error bound, we design a scheme to automatically adapt the frequency of restart from the observed decrease of the norm of the gradient mapping. Our algorithm has a better theoretical bound than previously proposed methods for the adaptation to the quadratic error bound of the objective. We illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm on Lasso, regularized logistic regression and total variation denoising problems.

A variational perspective on accelerated methods in optimization

Accelerated gradient methods play a central role in optimization, achieving optimal rates in many settings. Although many generalizations and extensions of Nesterov’s original acceleration method have been proposed, it is not yet clear what is the natural scope of the acceleration concept. In this paper, we study accelerated methods from a continuous-time perspective. We show that there is a Lagrangian functional that we call the Bregman Lagrangian, which generates a large class of accelerated methods in continuous time, including (but not limited to) accelerated gradient descent, its non-Euclidean extension, and accelerated higher-order gradient methods. We show that the continuous-time limit of all of these methods corresponds to traveling the same curve in spacetime at different speeds. From this perspective, Nesterov’s technique and many of its generalizations can be viewed as a systematic way to go from the continuous-time curves generated by the Bregman Lagrangian to a family of discrete-time accelerated algorithms.