We propose a decomposition framework for the parallel optimization of the sum of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) function and a nonsmooth (possibly nonseparable), convex one. The latter term is usually employed to enforce structure in the solution, typically sparsity. The main contribution of this work is a novel parallel, hybrid random/deterministic decomposition scheme wherein, at each iteration, a subset of (block) variables is updated at the same time by minimizing a convex surrogate of the original nonconvex function. To tackle huge-scale problems, the (block) variables to be updated are chosen according to a mixed random and deterministic procedure, which captures the advantages of both pure deterministic and random update-based schemes. Almost sure convergence of the proposed scheme is established. Numerical results show that on huge-scale problems the proposed hybrid random/deterministic algorithm compares favorably to random and deterministic schemes on both convex and nonconvex problems.

We propose a novel parallel asynchronous lock-free algorithmic framework for the minimization of the sum of a smooth nonconvex function and a convex nonsmooth regularizer. This class of problems arises in many big-data applications, including deep learning, matrix completions, and tensor factorization. Key features of the proposed algorithm are: i) it deals with nonconvex objective functions; ii) it is parallel and asynchronous; and iii) it is lock-free, meaning that components of the vector variables may be written by some cores while being simultaneously read by others. Almost sure convergence to stationary solutions is proved. The method enjoys properties that improve to a great extent over current ones and numerical results show that it outperforms existing asynchronous algorithms on both convex and nonconvex problems

We propose a new asynchronous parallel block-descent algorithmic framework for the minimization of the sum of a smooth nonconvex function and a nonsmooth convex one, subject to both convex and nonconvex constraints. The proposed framework hinges on successive convex approximation techniques and a novel probabilistic model that captures key elements of modern computational architectures and asynchronous implementations in a more faithful way than current state-of-the-art models. Other key features of the framework are: i) it covers in a unified way several specific solution methods; ii) it accommodates a variety of possible parallel computing architectures; and iii) it can deal with nonconvex constraints. Almost sure convergence to stationary solutions is proved, and theoretical complexity results are provided, showing nearly ideal linear speedup when the number of workers is not too large.

The Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms for finding the solution of nonlinear least squares problems. Across different modified variations of the basic procedure, the algorithm enjoys global convergence, a competitive worst case iteration complexity rate, and a guaranteed rate of local convergence for both zero and nonzero small residual problems, under suitable assumptions. We introduce a novel Levenberg-Marquardt method that matches, simultaneously, the state of the art in all of these convergence properties with a single seamless algorithm. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical behavior of our proposed algorithm.

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