English

A Universal Algorithm for Variational Inequalities Adaptive to Smoothness and Noise

Machine Learning 2019-02-06 v1 Optimization and Control Machine Learning

Abstract

We consider variational inequalities coming from monotone operators, a setting that includes convex minimization and convex-concave saddle-point problems. We assume an access to potentially noisy unbiased values of the monotone operators and assess convergence through a compatible gap function which corresponds to the standard optimality criteria in the aforementioned subcases. We present a universal algorithm for these inequalities based on the Mirror-Prox algorithm. Concretely, our algorithm simultaneously achieves the optimal rates for the smooth/non-smooth, and noisy/noiseless settings. This is done without any prior knowledge of these properties, and in the general set-up of arbitrary norms and compatible Bregman divergences. For convex minimization and convex-concave saddle-point problems, this leads to new adaptive algorithms. Our method relies on a novel yet simple adaptive choice of the step-size, which can be seen as the appropriate extension of AdaGrad to handle constrained problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.01637,
  title  = {A Universal Algorithm for Variational Inequalities Adaptive to Smoothness and Noise},
  author = {Francis Bach and Kfir Y. Levy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01637},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:32:22.657Z