Goto

Collaborating Authors

 efficient projection-free algorithm


Review for NeurIPS paper: Efficient Projection-free Algorithms for Saddle Point Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

Additional Feedback: - Eqns (2) & (3): This notation might be confusing for inexperienced readers. Min and max here can be perceived as functions rather than optimization problems. To clarify, you might either put some space between minmax and f, or simply drop minmax and write f(x,y) E[F(x,y,xi)]. You already have minmax in the model problem (1) anyway. First, we typically do not use LMO on X, but on a gradient term.


Efficient Projection-free Algorithms for Saddle Point Problems

Neural Information Processing Systems

The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a classic method for constrained optimization problems. It has recently been popular in many machine learning applications because its projection-free property leads to more efficient iterations. In this paper, we study projection-free algorithms for convex-strongly-concave saddle point problems with complicated constraints. Our method combines Conditional Gradient Sliding with Mirror-Prox and show that it only requires \tilde{\cO}(1/\sqrt{\epsilon}) gradient evaluations and \tilde{\cO}(1/\epsilon 2) linear optimizations in the batch setting. We also extend our method to the stochastic setting and propose first stochastic projection-free algorithms for saddle point problems. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms and verify our theoretical guarantees.


Improved Projection-free Online Continuous Submodular Maximization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We investigate the problem of online learning with monotone and continuous DR-submodular reward functions, which has received great attention recently. To efficiently handle this problem, especially in the case with complicated decision sets, previous studies have proposed an efficient projection-free algorithm called Mono-Frank-Wolfe (Mono-FW) using $O(T)$ gradient evaluations and linear optimization steps in total. However, it only attains a $(1-1/e)$-regret bound of $O(T^{4/5})$. In this paper, we propose an improved projection-free algorithm, namely POBGA, which reduces the regret bound to $O(T^{3/4})$ while keeping the same computational complexity as Mono-FW. Instead of modifying Mono-FW, our key idea is to make a novel combination of a projection-based algorithm called online boosting gradient ascent, an infeasible projection technique, and a blocking technique. Furthermore, we consider the decentralized setting and develop a variant of POBGA, which not only reduces the current best regret bound of efficient projection-free algorithms for this setting from $O(T^{4/5})$ to $O(T^{3/4})$, but also reduces the total communication complexity from $O(T)$ to $O(\sqrt{T})$.