Constrained Variable Projection for Structured Problems

This paper studies projection-free algorithms for stochastic constrained multi-level compositional optimization. In this context, the objective function is a nested composition of several smooth functions, and the decision set is closed and convex. Since projection onto the constraint set can be computationally expensive, we develop projection-free methods that rely on linear minimization oracles. For non-convex objectives, we propose variance-reduced projection-free algorithms and establish complexity guarantees under both the Frank-Wolfe gap and the gradient mapping criteria. We also develop momentum-based methods that achieve convergence guarantees under weaker smoothness assumptions. Additionally, by using a stage-wise design, we derive a parameter-free variant that preserves the same complexities for the Frank-Wolfe gap. Such a design can be further used to develop algorithms for convex and strongly convex functions whose rates match those of single-level projection-free counterparts. Finally, we consider finite-sum problems and derive complexities for non-convex, convex, and strongly convex objectives. Numerical experiments across multiple tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

Data scarcity poses a fundamental challenge in training generative models to produce initial guesses for parametric optimization problems that are otherwise numerically expensive to solve. We therefore study a $k$-neighborhood data collection strategy that augments datasets of converged solutions with intermediate solver iterates, increasing the amount of training data without additional solver runs. To understand the benefits of this approach, we derive a generalization bound based on Rademacher complexity that reveals the role of the $k$-neighborhoods and related parameters. To achieve this result, we focus on one-sided box-constrained quadratic programs solved by projected gradient descent. We illustrate the behavior of this solver on two examples. The approach proposed in this paper enables a more capable DDDAS paradigm by improving the efficiency of the data-model-optimization loop. We finish by discussing two views of learning solver-iterate data and connect our analysis with GLENS, a new data-efficient global search method.

Sparse recovery is among the most well-studied problems in learning theory and high-dimensional statistics. In this work, we investigate the statistical and computational landscapes of sparse recovery with $\ell_\infty$ error guarantees. This variant of the problem is motivated by \emph{variable selection} tasks, where the goal is to estimate the support of a $k$-sparse signal in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our main contribution is a provable separation between the \emph{oblivious} (for each'') and \emph{adaptive} (for all'') models of $\ell_\infty$ sparse recovery. We show that under an oblivious model, the optimal $\ell_\infty$ error is attainable in near-linear time with $\approx k\log d$ samples, whereas in an adaptive model, $\gtrsim k^2$ samples are necessary for any algorithm to achieve this bound. This establishes a surprising contrast with the standard $\ell_2$ setting, where $\approx k \log d$ samples suffice even for adaptive sparse recovery. We conclude with a preliminary examination of a \emph{partially-adaptive} model, where we show nontrivial variable selection guarantees are possible with $\approx k\log d$ measurements.