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The article is devoted to studying the application of convex optimization methods to solve the Cauchy problem for the Helmholtz equation, which is ill-posed since the equation belongs to the elliptic type. The Cauchy problem is formulated as an inverse problem and is reduced to a convex optimization problem in a Hilbert space. The functional to be optimized and its gradient are calculated using the solution of boundary value problems, which, in turn, are well-posed and can be approximately solved by standard numerical methods, such as finite-difference schemes and Fourier series expansions. The convergence of the applied fast gradient method and the quality of the solution obtained in this way are experimentally investigated. The experiment shows that the accelerated gradient method — the Similar Triangle Method — converges faster than the non-accelerated method. Theorems on the computational complexity of the resulting algorithms are formulated and proved. It is found that Fourier’s series expansions are better than finite-difference schemes in terms of the speed of calculations and improve the quality of the solution obtained. An attempt was made to use restarts of the Similar Triangle Method after halving the residual of the functional. In this case, the convergence does not improve, which confirms the absence of strong convexity. The experiments show that the inaccuracy of the calculations is more adequately described by the additive concept of the noise in the first-order oracle. This factor limits the achievable quality of the solution, but the error does not accumulate. According to the results obtained, the use of accelerated gradient optimization methods can be the way to solve inverse problems effectively.

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.

The grid-characteristic method is successfully used for solving hyperbolic systems of partial differential equations (for example, transport / acoustic / elastic equations). It allows to construct correctly algorithms on contact boundaries and boundaries of the integration domain, to a certain extent to take into account the physics of the problem (propagation of discontinuities along characteristic curves), and has the property of monotonicity, which is important for considered problems. In the cases of two-dimensional and three-dimensional problems the method makes use of a coordinate splitting technique, which enables us to solve the original equations by solving several one-dimensional ones consecutively. It is common to use up to 3-rd order one-dimensional schemes with simple splitting techniques which do not allow for the convergence order to be higher than two (with respect to time). Significant achievements in the operator splitting theory were done, the existence of higher-order schemes was proved. Its peculiarity is the need to perform a step in the opposite direction in time, which gives rise to difficulties, for example, for parabolic problems.

In this work coordinate splitting of the 3-rd and 4-th order were used for the two-dimensional hyperbolic problem of the linear elasticity. This made it possible to increase the final convergence order of the computational algorithm. The paper empirically estimates the convergence in L1 and L∞ norms using analytical solutions of the system with the sufficient degree of smoothness. To obtain objective results, we considered the cases of longitudinal and transverse plane waves propagating both along the diagonal of the computational cell and not along it. Numerical experiments demonstrated the improved accuracy and convergence order of constructed schemes. These improvements are achieved with the cost of three- or fourfold increase of the computational time (for the 3-rd and 4-th order respectively) and no additional memory requirements. The proposed improvement of the computational algorithm preserves the simplicity of its parallel implementation based on the spatial decomposition of the computational grid.

In the first part of the paper we present convergence analysis of AGMsDR method on a new class of functions — in general non-convex with $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradients that satisfy Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition. Method does not need the value of $\mu^{PL}>0$ in the condition and converges linearly with a scale factor $\left(1 - \frac{\mu^{PL}}{M}\right)$. It was previously proved that method converges as $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$ if a function is convex and has $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradient and converges linearly with a~scale factor $\left(1 - \sqrt{\frac{\mu^{SC}}{M}}\right)$ if the value of strong convexity parameter $\mu^{SC}>0$ is known. The novelty is that one can save linear convergence if $\frac{\mu^{PL}}{\mu^{SC}}$ is not known, but without square root in the scale factor.

The second part presents modification of AGMsDR method for solving problems that allow alternating minimization (Alternating AGMsDR). The similar results are proved.

As the result, we present adaptive accelerated methods that converge as $O\left(\min\left\lbrace\frac{M}{k^2},\,\left(1-{\frac{\mu^{PL}}{M}}\right)^{(k-1)}\right\rbrace\right)$ on a class of convex functions with $M$-Lipschitz-continuous gradient that satisfy Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition. Algorithms do not need values of $M$ and $\mu^{PL}$. If Polyak – Lojasiewicz condition does not hold, the convergence is $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$, but no tuning needed.

We also consider the adaptive catalyst envelope of non-accelerated gradient methods. The envelope allows acceleration up to $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$. We present numerical comparison of non-accelerated adaptive gradient descent which is accelerated using adaptive catalyst envelope with AGMsDR, Alternating AGMsDR, APDAGD (Adaptive Primal-Dual Accelerated Gradient Descent) and Sinkhorn's algorithm on the problem dual to the optimal transport problem.

Conducted experiments show faster convergence of alternating AGMsDR in comparison with described catalyst approach and AGMsDR, despite the same asymptotic rate $O\left(\frac1{k^2}\right)$. Such behavior can be explained by linear convergence of AGMsDR method and was tested on quadratic functions. Alternating AGMsDR demonstrated better performance in comparison with AGMsDR.

The problem of developing efficient numerical methods for non-convex (including non-smooth) problems is relevant due to their widespread use of such problems in applications. This paper is devoted to subgradient methods for minimizing Lipschitz $\mu$-weakly convex functions, which are not necessarily smooth. It is well known that subgradient methods have low convergence rates in high-dimensional spaces even for convex functions. However, if we consider a subclass of functions that satisfies sharp minimum condition and also use the Polyak step, we can guarantee a linear convergence rate of the subgradient method. In some cases, the values of the function or it’s subgradient may be available to the numerical method with some error. The accuracy of the solution provided by the numerical method depends on the magnitude of this error. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of the subgradient method with a Polyak step when inaccurate information about the objective function value or subgradient is used in iterations. We prove that with a specific choice of starting point, the subgradient method with some analogue of the Polyak step-size converges at a geometric progression rate on a class of $\mu$-weakly convex functions with a sharp minimum, provided that there is additive inaccuracy in the subgradient values. In the case when both the value of the function and the value of its subgradient at the current point are known with error, convergence to some neighborhood of the set of exact solutions is shown and the quality estimates of the output solution by the subgradient method with the corresponding analogue of the Polyak step are obtained. The article also proposes a subgradient method with a clipped step, and an assessment of the quality of the solution obtained by this method for the class of $\mu$-weakly convex functions with a sharp minimum is presented. Numerical experiments were conducted for the problem of low-rank matrix recovery. They showed that the efficiency of the studied algorithms may not depend on the accuracy of localization of the initial approximation within the required region, and the inaccuracy in the values of the function and subgradient may affect the number of iterations required to achieve an acceptable quality of the solution, but has almost no effect on the quality of the solution itself.

Variational inequalities constitute a broad class of problems with applications in a number of fields, including game theory, economics, and machine learning. Today’s practical applications of VIs are becoming increasingly computationally demanding. It is therefore necessary to employ distributed computations to solve such problems in a reasonable time. In this context, workers have to exchange data with each other, which creates a communication bottleneck. There are three main techniques to reduce the cost and the number of communications: the similarity of local operators, the compression of messages and the use of local steps on devices. There is an algorithm that uses all of these techniques to solve the VI problem and outperforms all previous methods in terms of communication complexity. However, this algorithm is limited to unbiased compression. Meanwhile, biased (contractive) compression leads to better results in practice, but it requires additional modifications within an algorithm and more effort to prove the convergence. In this work, we develop a new algorithm that solves distributed VI problems using data similarity, contractive compression and local steps on devices, derive the theoretical convergence of such an algorithm, and perform some experiments to show the applicability of the method.

We propose a family of Gauss –Newton methods for solving optimization problems and systems of nonlinear equations based on the ideas of using the upper estimate of the norm of the residual of the system of nonlinear equations and quadratic regularization. The paper presents a development of the «Three Squares Method» scheme with the addition of a momentum term to the update rule of the sought parameters in the problem to be solved. The resulting scheme has several remarkable properties. First, the paper algorithmically describes a whole parametric family of methods that minimize functionals of a special kind: compositions of the residual of a nonlinear equation and an unimodal functional. Such a functional, entirely consistent with the «gray box» paradigm in the problem description, combines a large number of solvable problems related to applications in machine learning, with the regression problems. Secondly, the obtained family of methods is described as a generalization of several forms of the Levenberg –Marquardt algorithm, allowing implementation in non-Euclidean spaces as well. The algorithm describing the parametric family of Gauss –Newton methods uses an iterative procedure that performs an inexact parametrized proximal mapping and shift using a momentum term. The paper contains a detailed analysis of the efficiency of the proposed family of Gauss – Newton methods; the derived estimates take into account the number of external iterations of the algorithm for solving the main problem, the accuracy and computational complexity of the local model representation and oracle computation. Sublinear and linear convergence conditions based on the Polak – Lojasiewicz inequality are derived for the family of methods. In both observed convergence regimes, the Lipschitz property of the residual of the nonlinear system of equations is locally assumed. In addition to the theoretical analysis of the scheme, the paper studies the issues of its practical implementation. In particular, in the experiments conducted for the suboptimal step, the schemes of effective calculation of the approximation of the best step are given, which makes it possible to improve the convergence of the method in practice in comparison with the original «Three Square Method». The proposed scheme combines several existing and frequently used in practice modifications of the Gauss –Newton method, in addition, the paper proposes a monotone momentum modification of the family of developed methods, which does not slow down the search for a solution in the worst case and demonstrates in practice an improvement in the convergence of the method.