skip to main content


Title: Adaptive Newton Sketch: Linear-time Optimization with Quadratic Convergence and Effective Hessian Dimensionality
We propose a randomized algorithm with quadratic convergence rate for convex optimization problems with a self-concordant, composite, strongly convex objective function. Our method is based on performing an approximate Newton step using a random projection of the Hessian. Our first contribution is to show that, at each iteration, the embedding dimension (or sketch size) can be as small as the effective dimension of the Hessian matrix. Leveraging this novel fundamental result, we design an algorithm with a sketch size proportional to the effective dimension and which exhibits a quadratic rate of convergence. This result dramatically improves on the classical linear-quadratic convergence rates of state-of-theart sub-sampled Newton methods. However, in most practical cases, the effective dimension is not known beforehand, and this raises the question of how to pick a sketch size as small as the effective dimension while preserving a quadratic convergence rate. Our second and main contribution is thus to propose an adaptive sketch size algorithm with quadratic convergence rate and which does not require prior knowledge or estimation of the effective dimension: at each iteration, it starts with a small sketch size, and increases it until quadratic progress is achieved. Importantly, we show that the embedding dimension remains proportional to the effective dimension throughout the entire path and that our method achieves state-of-the-art computational complexity for solving convex optimization programs with a strongly convex component. We discuss and illustrate applications to linear and quadratic programming, as well as logistic regression and other generalized linear models.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1838179
NSF-PAR ID:
10310553
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Preceedings of the 38th International Conference on Machine Learning
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    In distributed second order optimization, a standard strategy is to average many local estimates, each of which is based on a small sketch or batch of the data. However, the local estimates on each machine are typically biased, relative to the full solution on all of the data, and this can limit the effectiveness of averaging. Here, we introduce a new technique for debiasing the local estimates, which leads to both theoretical and empirical improvements in the convergence rate of distributed second order methods. Our technique has two novel components: (1) modifying standard sketching techniques to obtain what we call a surrogate sketch; and (2) carefully scaling the global regularization parameter for local computations. Our surrogate sketches are based on determinantal point processes, a family of distributions for which the bias of an estimate of the inverse Hessian can be computed exactly. Based on this computation, we show that when the objective being minimized is l2-regularized with parameter ! and individual machines are each given a sketch of size m, then to eliminate the bias, local estimates should be computed using a shrunk regularization parameter given by (See PDF), where d(See PDF) is the (See PDF)-effective dimension of the Hessian (or, for quadratic problems, the data matrix). 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    We provide an exact analysis of a class of randomized algorithms for solving overdetermined least-squares problems. We consider first-order methods, where the gradients are pre-conditioned by an approximation of the Hessian, based on a subspace embedding of the data matrix. This class of algorithms encompasses several randomized methods among the fastest solvers for leastsquares problems. We focus on two classical embeddings, namely, Gaussian projections and subsampled randomized Hadamard transforms (SRHT). Our key technical innovation is the derivation of the limiting spectral density of SRHT embeddings. Leveraging this novel result, we derive the family of normalized orthogonal polynomials of the SRHT density and we find the optimal pre-conditioned first-order method along with its rate of convergence. Our analysis of Gaussian embeddings proceeds similarly, and leverages classical random matrix theory results. In particular, we show that for a given sketch size, SRHT embeddings exhibits a faster rate of convergence than Gaussian embeddings. Then, we propose a new algorithm by optimizing the computational complexity over the choice of the sketching dimension. To our knowledge, our resulting algorithm yields the best known complexity for solving least-squares problems with no condition number dependence. 
    more » « less
  3. Inference-based optimization via simulation, which substitutes Gaussian process (GP) learning for the structural properties exploited in mathematical programming, is a powerful paradigm that has been shown to be remarkably effective in problems of modest feasible-region size and decision-variable dimension. The limitation to “modest” problems is a result of the computational overhead and numerical challenges encountered in computing the GP conditional (posterior) distribution on each iteration. In this paper, we substantially expand the size of discrete-decision-variable optimization-via-simulation problems that can be attacked in this way by exploiting a particular GP—discrete Gaussian Markov random fields—and carefully tailored computational methods. The result is the rapid Gaussian Markov Improvement Algorithm (rGMIA), an algorithm that delivers both a global convergence guarantee and finite-sample optimality-gap inference for significantly larger problems. Between infrequent evaluations of the global conditional distribution, rGMIA applies the full power of GP learning to rapidly search smaller sets of promising feasible solutions that need not be spatially close. We carefully document the computational savings via complexity analysis and an extensive empirical study. Summary of Contribution: The broad topic of the paper is optimization via simulation, which means optimizing some performance measure of a system that may only be estimated by executing a stochastic, discrete-event simulation. Stochastic simulation is a core topic and method of operations research. The focus of this paper is on significantly speeding-up the computations underlying an existing method that is based on Gaussian process learning, where the underlying Gaussian process is a discrete Gaussian Markov Random Field. This speed-up is accomplished by employing smart computational linear algebra, state-of-the-art algorithms, and a careful divide-and-conquer evaluation strategy. Problems of significantly greater size than any other existing algorithm with similar guarantees can solve are solved as illustrations. 
    more » « less
  4. We study performance of accelerated first-order optimization algorithms in the presence of additive white stochastic disturbances. For strongly convex quadratic problems, we explicitly evaluate the steady-state variance of the optimization variable in terms of the eigenvalues of the Hessian of the objective function. We demonstrate that, as the condition number increases, variance amplification of both Nesterov's accelerated method and the heavy-ball method by Polyak is significantly larger than that of the standard gradient descent. In the context of distributed computation over networks, we examine the role of network topology and spatial dimension on the performance of these first-order algorithms. For d-dimensional tori, we establish explicit asymptotic dependence for the variance amplification on the network size and the corresponding condition number. Our results demonstrate detrimental influence of acceleration on amplification of stochastic disturbances and suggest that metrics other than convergence rate have to be considered when evaluating performance of optimization algorithms. 
    more » « less
  5. This work concerns the analysis and design of distributed first-order optimization algorithms over time-varying graphs. The goal of such algorithms is to optimize a global function that is the average of local functions using only local computations and communications. Several different algorithms have been proposed that achieve linear convergence to the global optimum when the local functions are strongly convex. We provide a unified analysis that yields the worst-case linear convergence rate as a function of the condition number of the local functions, the spectral gap of the graph, and the parameters of the algorithm. The framework requires solving a small semidefinite program whose size is fixed; it does not depend on the number of local functions or the dimension of their domain. The result is a computationally efficient method for distributed algorithm analysis that enables the rapid comparison, selection, and tuning of algorithms. Finally, we propose a new algorithm, which we call SVL, that is easily implementable and achieves a faster worst-case convergence rate than all other known algorithms. 
    more » « less