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We consider the approaches to the construction of methods for solving four-dimensional programming problems for calculating directions for multiple minimizations of smooth functions on a set of a given set of linear equalities. The approach consists of two stages.

At the first stage, the problem of quadratic programming is transformed by a numerically stable direct multiplicative algorithm into an equivalent problem of designing the origin of coordinates on a linear manifold, which defines a new mathematical formulation of the dual quadratic problem. For this, a numerically stable direct multiplicative method for solving systems of linear equations is proposed, taking into account the sparsity of matrices presented in packaged form. The advantage of this approach is to calculate the modified Cholesky factors to construct a substantially positive definite matrix of the system of equations and its solution in the framework of one procedure. And also in the possibility of minimizing the filling of the main rows of multipliers without losing the accuracy of the results, and no changes are made in the position of the next processed row of the matrix, which allows the use of static data storage formats.

At the second stage, the necessary and sufficient optimality conditions in the form of Kuhn–Tucker determine the calculation of the direction of descent — the solution of the dual quadratic problem is reduced to solving a system of linear equations with symmetric positive definite matrix for calculating of Lagrange's coefficients multipliers and to substituting the solution into the formula for calculating the direction of descent.

It is proved that the proposed approach to the calculation of the direction of descent by numerically stable direct multiplicative methods at one iteration requires a cubic law less computation than one iteration compared to the well-known dual method of Gill and Murray. Besides, the proposed method allows the organization of the computational process from any starting point that the user chooses as the initial approximation of the solution.

Variants of the problem of designing the origin of coordinates on a linear manifold, a convex polyhedron and a vertex of a convex polyhedron are presented. Also the relationship and implementation of methods for solving these problems are described.

In this work we consider Monteiro – Svaiter accelerated hybrid proximal extragradient (A-HPE) framework and accelerated Newton proximal extragradient (A-NPE) framework. The last framework contains an optimal method for rather smooth convex optimization problems with second-order oracle. We generalize A-NPE framework for higher order derivative oracle (schemes). We replace Newton’s type step in A-NPE that was used for auxiliary problem by Newton’s regularized (tensor) type step (Yu. Nesterov, 2018). Moreover we generalize large step A-HPE/A-NPE framework by replacing Monteiro – Svaiter’s large step condition so that this framework could work for high-order schemes. The main contribution of the paper is as follows: we propose optimal highorder methods for convex optimization problems. As far as we know for that moment there exist only zero, first and second order optimal methods that work according to the lower bounds. For higher order schemes there exists a gap between the lower bounds (Arjevani, Shamir, Shiff, 2017) and existing high-order (tensor) methods (Nesterov – Polyak, 2006; Yu.Nesterov, 2008; M. Baes, 2009; Yu.Nesterov, 2018). Asymptotically the ratio of the rates of convergences for the best existing methods and lower bounds is about 1.5. In this work we eliminate this gap and show that lower bounds are tight. We also consider rather smooth strongly convex optimization problems and show how to generalize the proposed methods to this case. The basic idea is to use restart technique until iteration sequence reach the region of quadratic convergence of Newton method and then use Newton method. One can show that the considered method converges with optimal rates up to a logarithmic factor. Note, that proposed in this work technique can be generalized in the case when we can’t solve auxiliary problem exactly, moreover we can’t even calculate the derivatives of the functional exactly. Moreover, the proposed technique can be generalized to the composite optimization problems and in particular to the constraint convex optimization problems. We also formulate a list of open questions that arise around the main result of this paper (optimal universal method of high order e.t.c.).

The problem of online convex optimization naturally occurs in cases when there is an update of statistical information. The mirror descent method is well known for non-smooth optimization problems. Mirror descent is an extension of the subgradient method for solving non-smooth convex optimization problems in the case of a non-Euclidean distance. This paper is devoted to a stochastic variant of recently proposed Mirror Descent methods for convex online optimization problems with convex Lipschitz (generally, non-smooth) functional constraints. This means that we can still use the value of the functional constraint, but instead of (sub)gradient of the objective functional and the functional constraint, we use their stochastic (sub)gradients. More precisely, assume that on a closed subset of $n$-dimensional vector space, $N$ convex Lipschitz non-smooth functionals are given. The problem is to minimize the arithmetic mean of these functionals with a convex Lipschitz constraint. Two methods are proposed, for solving this problem, using stochastic (sub)gradients: adaptive method (does not require knowledge of Lipschitz constant neither for the objective functional, nor for the functional of constraint) and non-adaptivemethod (requires knowledge of Lipschitz constant for the objective functional and the functional of constraint). Note that it is allowed to calculate the stochastic (sub)gradient of each functional only once. In the case of non-negative regret, we find that the number of non-productive steps is $O$($N$), which indicates the optimality of the proposed methods. We consider an arbitrary proximal structure, which is essential for decisionmaking problems. The results of numerical experiments are presented, allowing to compare the work of adaptive and non-adaptive methods for some examples. It is shown that the adaptive method can significantly improve the number of the found solutions.

In this work we consider a possibility to use the conception of $(\delta, L)$-model of a function for optimization tasks, whereby solving a primal problem there is a necessity to recover a solution of a dual problem. The conception of $(\delta, L)$-model is based on the conception of $(\delta, L)$-oracle which was proposed by Devolder–Glineur–Nesterov, herewith the authors proposed approximate a function with an upper bound using a convex quadratic function with some additive noise $\delta$. They managed to get convex quadratic upper bounds with noise even for nonsmooth functions. The conception of $(\delta, L)$-model continues this idea by using instead of a convex quadratic function a more complex convex function in an upper bound. Possibility to recover the solution of a dual problem gives great benefits in different problems, for instance, in some cases, it is faster to find a solution in a primal problem than in a dual problem. Note that primal-dual methods are well studied, but usually each class of optimization problems has its own primal-dual method. Our goal is to develop a method which can find solutions in different classes of optimization problems. This is realized through the use of the conception of $(\delta, L)$-model and adaptive structure of our methods. Thereby, we developed primal-dual adaptive gradient method and fast gradient method with $(\delta, L)$-model and proved convergence rates of the methods, moreover, for some classes of optimization problems the rates are optimal. The main idea is the following: we find a dual solution to an approximation of a primal problem using the conception of $(\delta, L)$-model. It is much easier to find a solution to an approximated problem, however, we have to do it in each step of our method, thereby the principle of “divide and conquer” is realized.

In this paper, we consider conditional gradient methods for optimizing strongly convex functions. These are methods that use a linear minimization oracle, which, for a given vector $p \in \mathbb{R}^n$, computes the solution of the subproblem

\[ \text{Argmin}_{x\in X}{\langle p,\,x \rangle}. \]There are a variety of conditional gradient methods that have a linear convergence rate in a strongly convex case. However, in all these methods, the dimension of the problem is included in the rate of convergence, which in modern applications can be very large. In this paper, we prove that in the strongly convex case, the convergence rate of the conditional gradient methods in the best case depends on the dimension of the problem $ n $ as $ \widetilde {\Omega} \left(\!\sqrt {n}\right) $. Thus, the conditional gradient methods may turn out to be ineffective for solving strongly convex optimization problems of large dimensions.

Also, the application of conditional gradient methods to minimization problems of a quadratic form is considered. The effectiveness of the Frank – Wolfe method for solving the quadratic optimization problem in the convex case on a simplex (PageRank) has already been proved. This work shows that the use of conditional gradient methods to solve the minimization problem of a quadratic form in a strongly convex case is ineffective due to the presence of dimension in the convergence rate of these methods. Therefore, the Shrinking Conditional Gradient method is considered. Its difference from the conditional gradient methods is that it uses a modified linear minimization oracle. It's an oracle, which, for a given vector $p \in \mathbb{R}^n$, computes the solution of the subproblem \[ \text{Argmin}\{\langle p, \,x \rangle\colon x\in X, \;\|x-x_0^{}\| \leqslant R \}. \] The convergence rate of such an algorithm does not depend on dimension. Using the Shrinking Conditional Gradient method the complexity (the total number of arithmetic operations) of solving the minimization problem of quadratic form on a $ \infty $-ball is obtained. The resulting evaluation of the method is comparable to the complexity of the gradient method.

We consider a numerically stable direct multiplicative algorithm of solving linear equations systems, which takes into account the sparseness of matrices presented in a packed form. The advantage of the algorithm is the ability to minimize the filling of the main rows of multipliers without losing the accuracy of the results. Moreover, changes in the position of the next processed row of the matrix are not made, what allows using static data storage formats. Linear system solving by a direct multiplicative algorithm is, like the solving with $LU$-decomposition, just another scheme of the Gaussian elimination method implementation.

In this paper, this algorithm is the basis for solving the following problems:

Problem 1. Setting the descent direction in Newtonian methods of unconditional optimization by integrating one of the known techniques of constructing an essentially positive definite matrix. This approach allows us to weaken or remove additional specific difficulties caused by the need to solve large equation systems with sparse matrices presented in a packed form.

Problem 2. Construction of a new mathematical formulation of the problem of quadratic programming and a new form of specifying necessary and sufficient optimality conditions. They are quite simple and can be used to construct mathematical programming methods, for example, to find the minimum of a quadratic function on a polyhedral set of constraints, based on solving linear equations systems, which dimension is not higher than the number of variables of the objective function.

Problem 3. Construction of a continuous analogue of the problem of minimizing a real quadratic polynomial in Boolean variables and a new form of defining necessary and sufficient conditions of optimality for the development of methods for solving them in polynomial time. As a result, the original problem is reduced to the problem of finding the minimum distance between the origin and the angular point of a convex polyhedron, which is a perturbation of the $n$-dimensional cube and is described by a system of double linear inequalities with an upper triangular matrix of coefficients with units on the main diagonal. Only two faces are subject to investigation, one of which or both contains the vertices closest to the origin. To calculate them, it is sufficient to solve $4n – 4$ linear equations systems and choose among them all the nearest equidistant vertices in polynomial time. The problem of minimizing a quadratic polynomial is $NP$-hard, since an $NP$-hard problem about a vertex covering for an arbitrary graph comes down to it. It follows therefrom that $P = NP$, which is based on the development beyond the limits of integer optimization methods.

Recently, saddle point problems have received much attention due to their powerful modeling capability for a lot of problems from diverse domains. Applications of these problems occur in many applied areas, such as robust optimization, distributed optimization, game theory, and many applications in machine learning such as empirical risk minimization and generative adversarial networks training. Therefore, many researchers have actively worked on developing numerical methods for solving saddle point problems in many different settings. This paper is devoted to developing a numerical method for solving saddle point problems in the nonconvex uniformly-concave setting. We study a general class of saddle point problems with composite structure and H\"older-continuous higher-order derivatives. To solve the problem under consideration, we propose an approach in which we reduce the problem to a combination of two auxiliary optimization problems separately for each group of variables, the outer minimization problem w.r.t. primal variables, and the inner maximization problem w.r.t the dual variables. For solving the outer minimization problem, we use the Adaptive Gradient Method, which is applicable for nonconvex problems and also works with an inexact oracle that is generated by approximately solving the inner problem. For solving the inner maximization problem, we use the Restarted Unified Acceleration Framework, which is a framework that unifies the high-order acceleration methods for minimizing a convex function that has H\"older-continuous higher-order derivatives. Separate complexity bounds are provided for the number of calls to the first-order oracles for the outer minimization problem and higher-order oracles for the inner maximization problem. Moreover, the complexity of the whole proposed approach is then estimated.

In this paper we discuss lower bounds for convergence of convex optimization methods of high order and attainability of this bounds. We formulate a hypothesis that covers all the cases. It is noticeable that we provide this statement without a proof. Newton method is the most famous method that uses gradient and Hessian of optimized function. However, it converges locally even for strongly convex functions. Global convergence can be achieved with cubic regularization of Newton method [Nesterov, Polyak, 2006], whose iteration cost is comparable with iteration cost of Newton method and is equivalent to inversion of Hessian of optimized function. Yu.Nesterov proposed accelerated variant of Newton method with cubic regularization in 2008 [Nesterov, 2008]. R.Monteiro and B. Svaiter managed to improve global convergence of cubic regularized method in 2013 [Monteiro, Svaiter, 2013]. Y.Arjevani, O. Shamir and R. Shiff showed that convergence bound of Monteiro and Svaiter is optimal (cannot be improved by more than logarithmic factor with any second order method) in 2017 [Arjevani et al., 2017]. They also managed to find bounds for convex optimization methods of p-th order for $p ≥ 2$. However, they got bounds only for first and second order methods for strongly convex functions. In 2018 Yu.Nesterov proposed third order convex optimization methods with rate of convergence that is close to this lower bounds and with similar to Newton method cost of iteration [Nesterov, 2018]. Consequently, it was showed that high order methods can be practical. In this paper we formulate lower bounds for p-th order methods for $p ≥ 3$ for strongly convex unconstrained optimization problems. This paper can be viewed as a little survey of state of the art of high order optimization methods.

The paper is devoted to the problem of minimization of the non-smooth functional $f$ with a non-positive non-smooth Lipschitz-continuous functional constraint. We consider the formulation of the problem in the case of quasi-convex functionals. We propose new strategies of step-sizes and adaptive stopping rules in Mirror Descent for the considered class of problems. It is shown that the methods are applicable to the objective functionals of various levels of smoothness. Applying a special restart technique to the considered version of Mirror Descent there was proposed an optimal method for optimization problems with strongly convex objective functionals. Estimates of the rate of convergence for the considered methods are obtained depending on the level of smoothness of the objective functional. These estimates indicate the optimality of the considered methods from the point of view of the theory of lower oracle bounds. In particular, the optimality of our approach for Höldercontinuous quasi-convex (sub)differentiable objective functionals is proved. In addition, the case of a quasiconvex objective functional and functional constraint was considered. In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing a non-smooth functional $f$ in the presence of a Lipschitz-continuous non-positive non-smooth functional constraint $g$, and the problem statement in the cases of quasi-convex and strongly (quasi-)convex functionals is considered separately. The paper presents numerical experiments demonstrating the advantages of using the considered methods.

In this paper, we consider the problem of restoring the correspondence matrix based on the observations of real correspondences in Moscow. Following the conventional approach [Gasnikov et al., 2013], the transport network is considered as a directed graph whose edges correspond to road sections and the graph vertices correspond to areas that the traffic participants leave or enter. The number of city residents is considered constant. The problem of restoring the correspondence matrix is to calculate all the correspondence from the $i$ area to the $j$ area.

To restore the matrix, we propose to use one of the most popular methods of calculating the correspondence matrix in urban studies — the entropy model. In our work, which is based on the work [Wilson, 1978], we describe the evolutionary justification of the entropy model and the main idea of the transition to solving the problem of entropy-linear programming (ELP) in calculating the correspondence matrix. To solve the ELP problem, it is proposed to pass to the dual problem. In this paper, we describe several numerical optimization methods for solving this problem: the Sinkhorn method and the Accelerated Sinkhorn method. We provide numerical experiments for the following variants of cost functions: a linear cost function and a superposition of the power and logarithmic cost functions. In these functions, the cost is a combination of average time and distance between areas, which depends on the parameters. The correspondence matrix is calculated for multiple sets of parameters and then we calculate the quality of the restored matrix relative to the known correspondence matrix.

We assume that the noise in the restored correspondence matrix is Gaussian, as a result, we use the standard deviation as a quality metric. The article provides an overview of gradient-free optimization methods for solving non-convex problems. Since the number of parameters of the cost function is small, we use the grid search method to find the optimal parameters of the cost function. Thus, the correspondence matrix calculated for each set of parameters and then the quality of the restored matrix is evaluated relative to the known correspondence matrix. Further, according to the minimum residual value for each cost function, we determine for which cost function and at what parameter values the restored matrix best describes real correspondence.