Related papers: Open Problem: Two Riddles in Heavy-Ball Dynamics
In 1964, Polyak showed that the Heavy-ball method, the simplest momentum technique, accelerates convergence of strongly-convex problems in the vicinity of the solution. While Nesterov later developed a globally accelerated version, Polyak's…
The Heavy Ball Method, proposed by Polyak over five decades ago, is a first-order method for optimizing continuous functions. While its stochastic counterpart has proven extremely popular in training deep networks, there are almost no known…
Heavy Ball (HB) nowadays is one of the most popular momentum methods in non-convex optimization. It has been widely observed that incorporating the Heavy Ball dynamic in gradient-based methods accelerates the training process of modern…
We focus on the solutions of second-order stable linear difference equations and demonstrate that their behavior can be non-monotone and exhibit peak effects depending on initial conditions. The results are applied to the analysis of the…
This paper deals with a natural stochastic optimization procedure derived from the so-called Heavy-ball method differential equation, which was introduced by Polyak in the 1960s with his seminal contribution [Pol64]. The Heavy-ball method…
Among first order optimization methods, Polyak's heavy ball method has long been known to guarantee the asymptotic rate of convergence matching Nesterov's lower bound for functions defined in an infinite-dimensional space. In this paper, we…
In this work, we show that the heavy-ball ($\HB$) method provably does not reach an accelerated convergence rate on smooth strongly convex problems. More specifically, we show that for any condition number and any choice of algorithmic…
In this work, we propose an adaptive variation on the classical Heavy-ball method for convex quadratic minimization. The adaptivity crucially relies on so-called "Polyak step-sizes", which consists in using the knowledge of the optimal…
We study convergence of the trajectories of the Heavy Ball dynamical system, with constant damping coefficient, in the framework of convex and non-convex smooth optimization. By using the Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz condition, we derive new…
Momentum methods for convex optimization often rely on precise choices of algorithmic parameters, based on knowledge of problem parameters, in order to achieve fast convergence, as well as to prevent oscillations that could severely…
Polyak momentum (PM), also known as the heavy-ball method, is a widely used optimization method that enjoys an asymptotic optimal worst-case complexity on quadratic objectives. However, its remarkable empirical success is not fully…
In this series of eight papers we present the applications of methods from wavelet analysis to polynomial approximations for a number of accelerator physics problems. In this part we consider orbital motion in transverse plane for a single…
This paper addresses smooth convexly constrained optimization problems where the Euclidean projection onto the feasible set is computationally tractable. Although momentum techniques like Polyak's heavy-ball are known for accelerating…
Heavy-Ball method (HB) is known for its simplicity in implementation and practical efficiency. However, as with other momentum methods, it has non-monotone behavior, and for optimal parameters, the method suffers from the so-called peak…
When considering the minimization of a quadratic or strongly convex function, it is well known that first-order methods involving an inertial term weighted by a constant-in-time parameter are particularly efficient (see Polyak [32],…
We consider two high-order tuners that have been shown to have accelerated performance, one based on Polyak's heavy ball method and another based on Nesterov's acceleration method. We show that parameter estimates are bounded and converge…
The aim of this paper is to share with the mathematical community a list of 33 problems that I have found along the years during my research. I believe that it is worth to think about them and, hopefully, it will be possible either to solve…
In this paper we consider ill-posed inverse problems, both linear and nonlinear, by a heavy ball method in which a strongly convex regularization function is incorporated to detect the feature of the sought solution. We develop ideas on how…
Iterative gradient-based optimization algorithms are widely used to solve difficult or large-scale optimization problems. There are many algorithms to choose from, such as gradient descent and its accelerated variants such as Polyak's Heavy…
In this work, we analyze the convergence of Polyak's heavy ball method in both continuous and discrete time for non-convex $C^4$-objective functions satisfying the Polyak-Lojasiewicz inequality. Under this weak assumption, we recover the…