All issues

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 purpose of this work is to develop a universal computer program (solver) which solves kinetic Boltzmann equation for simulations of rarefied gas flows in complexly shaped devices. The structure of the solver is described in details. Its efficiency is demonstrated on an example of calculations of a modern many tubes Knudsen pump. The kinetic Boltzmann equation is solved by finite-difference method on discrete grid in spatial and velocity spaces. The differential advection operator is approximated by finite difference method. The calculation of the collision integral is based on the conservative projection method.

In the developed computational program the unstructured spatial mesh is generated using GMSH and may include prisms, tetrahedrons, hexahedrons and pyramids. The mesh is denser in areas of flow with large gradients of gas parameters. A three-dimensional velocity grid consists of cubic cells of equal volume.

A huge amount of calculations requires effective parallelization of the algorithm which is implemented in the program with the use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) technology. An information transfer from one node to another is implemented as a kind of boundary condition. As a result, every MPI node contains the information about only its part of the grid.

The main result of the work is presented in the graph of pressure difference in 2 reservoirs connected by a multitube Knudsen pump from Knudsen number. This characteristic of the Knudsen pump obtained by numerical methods shows the quality of the pump. Distributions of pressure, temperature and gas concentration in a steady state inside the pump and the reservoirs are presented as well.

The correctness of the solver is checked using two special test solutions of more simple boundary problems — test with temperature distribution between 2 planes with different temperatures and test with conservation of total gas mass.

The correctness of the obtained data for multitube Knudsen pump is checked using denser spatial and velocity grids, using more collisions in collision integral per time step.

The work is devoted to the construction of efficient and applicable to real tasks first-order methods of convex optimization, that is, using only values of the target function and its derivatives. Construction uses OGMG, fast gradient method which is optimal by complexity, but requires to know the Lipschitz constant for gradient and the strong convexity constant to determine the number of steps and step length. This requirement makes practical usage very hard. An adaptive on the constant for strong convexity algorithm ACGM is proposed, based on restarts of the OGM-G with update of the strong convexity constant estimate, and an adaptive on the Lipschitz constant for gradient ALGM, in which the use of OGM-G restarts is supplemented by the selection of the Lipschitz constant with verification of the smoothness conditions used in the universal gradient descent method. This eliminates the disadvantages of the original method associated with the need to know these constants, which makes practical usage possible. Optimality of estimates for the complexity of the constructed algorithms is proved. To verify the results obtained, experiments on model functions and real tasks from machine learning are carried out.

We consider one of the problems of transport modelling — searching the equilibrium distribution of traffic flows in the network. We use the classic Beckman’s model to describe time costs and flow distribution in the network represented by directed graph. Meanwhile agents’ behavior is not completely rational, what is described by the introduction of Markov logit dynamics: any driver selects a route randomly according to the Gibbs’ distribution taking into account current time costs on the edges of the graph. Thus, the problem is reduced to searching of the stationary distribution for this dynamics which is a stochastic Nash – Wardrope equilibrium in the corresponding population congestion game in the transport network. Since the game is potential, this problem is equivalent to the problem of minimization of some functional over flows distribution. The stochasticity is reflected in the appearance of the entropy regularization, in contrast to non-stochastic case. The dual problem is constructed to obtain a solution of the optimization problem. The universal primal-dual gradient method is applied. A major specificity of this method lies in an adaptive adjustment to the local smoothness of the problem, what is most important in case of the complex structure of the objective function and an inability to obtain a prior smoothness bound with acceptable accuracy. Such a situation occurs in the considered problem since the properties of the function strongly depend on the transport graph, on which we do not impose strong restrictions. The article describes the algorithm including the numerical differentiation for calculation of the objective function value and gradient. In addition, the paper represents a theoretical estimate of time complexity of the algorithm and the results of numerical experiments conducted on a small American town.

The paper presents a mathematical model that describes the process of obtaining biogas from livestock waste. This model describes the processes occurring in a biogas plant for mesophilic and thermophilic media, as well as for continuous and periodic modes of substrate inflow. The values of the coefficients of this model found earlier for the periodic mode, obtained by solving the problem of model identification from experimental data using a genetic algorithm, are given.

For the model of methanogenesis, an optimal control problem is formulated in the form of a Lagrange problem, whose criterial functionality is the output of biogas over a certain period of time. The controlling parameter of the task is the rate of substrate entry into the biogas plant. An algorithm for solving this problem is proposed, based on the numerical implementation of the Pontryagin maximum principle. In this case, a hybrid genetic algorithm with an additional search in the vicinity of the best solution using the method of conjugate gradients was used as an optimization method. This numerical method for solving an optimal control problem is universal and applicable to a wide class of mathematical models.

In the course of the study, various modes of submission of the substrate to the digesters, temperature environments and types of raw materials were analyzed. It is shown that the rate of biogas production in the continuous feed mode is 1.4–1.9 times higher in the mesophilic medium (1.9–3.2 in the thermophilic medium) than in the periodic mode over the period of complete fermentation, which is associated with a higher feed rate of the substrate and a greater concentration of nutrients in the substrate. However, the yield of biogas during the period of complete fermentation with a periodic mode is twice as high as the output over the period of a complete change of the substrate in the methane tank at a continuous mode, which means incomplete processing of the substrate in the second case. The rate of biogas formation for a thermophilic medium in continuous mode and the optimal rate of supply of raw materials is three times higher than for a mesophilic medium. Comparison of biogas output for various types of raw materials shows that the highest biogas output is observed for waste poultry farms, the least — for cattle farms waste, which is associated with the nutrient content in a unit of substrate of each type.

In this paper, we develop a new first-order method for composite nonconvex minimization problems with simple constraints and inexact oracle. The objective function is given as a sum of «hard», possibly nonconvex part, and «simple» convex part. Informally speaking, oracle inexactness means that, for the «hard» part, at any point we can approximately calculate the value of the function and construct a quadratic function, which approximately bounds this function from above. We give several examples of such inexactness: smooth nonconvex functions with inexact H¨older-continuous gradient, functions given by the auxiliary uniformly concave maximization problem, which can be solved only approximately. For the introduced class of problems, we propose a gradient-type method, which allows one to use a different proximal setup to adapt to the geometry of the feasible set, adaptively chooses controlled oracle error, allows for inexact proximal mapping. We provide a convergence rate for our method in terms of the norm of generalized gradient mapping and show that, in the case of an inexact Hölder-continuous gradient, our method is universal with respect to Hölder parameters of the problem. Finally, in a particular case, we show that the small value of the norm of generalized gradient mapping at a point means that a necessary condition of local minimum approximately holds at that point.

This paper is devoted to some variants of improving the convergence rate guarantees of the gradient-type algorithms for relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems in the case of additional information about some analogues of the strong convexity of the objective function. We consider two classes of problems, namely, convex problems with a relative functional growth condition, and problems (generally, non-convex) with an analogue of the Polyak – Lojasiewicz gradient dominance condition with respect to Bregman divergence. For the first type of problems, we propose two restart schemes for the gradient type methods and justify theoretical estimates of the convergence of two algorithms with adaptively chosen parameters corresponding to the relative smoothness or Lipschitz property of the objective function. The first of these algorithms is simpler in terms of the stopping criterion from the iteration, but for this algorithm, the near-optimal computational guarantees are justified only on the class of relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems. The restart procedure of another algorithm, in its turn, allowed us to obtain more universal theoretical results. We proved a near-optimal estimate of the complexity on the class of convex relatively Lipschitz continuous problems with a functional growth condition. We also obtained linear convergence rate guarantees on the class of relatively smooth problems with a functional growth condition. For a class of problems with an analogue of the gradient dominance condition with respect to the Bregman divergence, estimates of the quality of the output solution were obtained using adaptively selected parameters. We also present the results of some computational experiments illustrating the performance of the methods for the second approach at the conclusion of the paper. As examples, we considered a linear inverse Poisson problem (minimizing the Kullback – Leibler divergence), its regularized version which allows guaranteeing a relative strong convexity of the objective function, as well as an example of a relatively smooth and relatively strongly convex problem. In particular, calculations show that a relatively strongly convex function may not satisfy the relative variant of the gradient dominance condition.

The article is devoted to first-order adaptive methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex functionals. The concept of relatively strong convexity significantly extends the classical concept of convexity by replacing the Euclidean norm in the definition by the distance in a more general sense (more precisely, by Bregman’s divergence). An important feature of the considered classes of problems is the reduced requirements concerting the level of smoothness of objective functionals. More precisely, we consider relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous objective functionals, which allows us to apply the proposed techniques for solving many applied problems, such as the intersection of the ellipsoids problem (IEP), the Support Vector Machine (SVM) for a binary classification problem, etc. If the objective functional is convex, the condition of relatively strong convexity can be satisfied using the problem regularization. In this work, we propose adaptive gradient-type methods for optimization problems with relatively strongly convex and relatively Lipschitzcontinuous functionals for the first time. Further, we propose universal methods for relatively strongly convex optimization problems. This technique is based on introducing an artificial inaccuracy into the optimization model, so the proposed methods can be applied both to the case of relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous functionals. Additionally, we demonstrate the optimality of the proposed universal gradient-type methods up to the multiplication by a constant for both classes of relatively strongly convex problems. Also, we show how to apply the technique of restarts of the mirror descent algorithm to solve relatively Lipschitz-continuous optimization problems. Moreover, we prove the optimal estimate of the rate of convergence of such a technique. Also, we present the results of numerical experiments to compare the performance of the proposed methods.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.