We analyze a stochastic algorithm with Halpern anchoring for constrained convex-concave problems and monotone variational inequalities. This algorithm is single-loop and single-call since it uses one unbiased sample of the gradient operator at every iteration to be applicable to monotone games with noisy feedback. With t denoting the iteration counter, we prove the anytime last-iterate convergence rate of O(t−1/4) for both gradient-mapping norm and restricted gap, improving the best-known rate O(t−1/5) that was obtained for the restricted gap function. Our rates cover constrained problems with a potentially unbounded feasible set as well as a structured class of stochastic oracles without a bounded variance.
We study first-order methods for solving monotone variational inequalities arising in min-max optimization. Classical approaches such as the extragradient method rely on two gradient queries per iteration, which limits their analysis and applicability in the online and stochastic settings. We propose a family of Generalized Optimistic Methods with Anchoring (GOMA), which combine two-time-scale optimistic updates with an anchoring term inspired by Halpern iteration. In the deterministic setting, GOMA achieves the optimal accelerated last-iterate rate O(1/k2) on the squared gradient norm for monotone Lipschitz operators. In the stochastic setting with unbounded variance, a simplified single-call variant of GOMA achieves a last-iterate convergence rate of O(1/k) on the squared gradient norm. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such guarantee for stochastic monotone Lipschitz variational inequalities in the unconstrained setting without variance reduction or growing batches.
Motahareh Sohrabi, Jianxin You, Simon Lacoste-Julien +2
We revisit a classical assumption for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms where the squared norm of the stochastic subgradient (or the variance for smooth problems) is allowed to grow as fast as the squared norm of the optimization variable. We contextualize this assumption in view of its inception in the 1960s, its seemingly independent appearance in the recent literature, its relationship to weakest-known variance assumptions for analyzing stochastic gradient algorithms, and its relevance in deterministic problems for non-Lipschitz nonsmooth convex optimization. We build on and extend a connection recently made between this assumption and the Halpern iteration. For convex nonsmooth, and potentially stochastic, optimization, we analyze horizon-free, anytime algorithms with last-iterate rates. For problems beyond simple constrained optimization, such as convex problems with functional constraints or regularized convex-concave min-max problems, we obtain rates for optimality measures that do not require boundedness of the feasible set.
We study the stochastic first-order oracle complexity for constrained or regularized convex-concave min-max optimization and stochastic monotone variational inequalities. We focus on the case when suboptimality is measured in terms of the gradient mapping, also known as, forward-backward or natural residual, an optimality notion that generalizes the gradient norm for unconstrained problems. In this setting, under standard unbiased oracle access with now-standard variance assumptions, the best-known complexity for making the norm of the gradient mapping less than ε is O(ε−4), compared to the near-optimal O(ε−2) that is established in the unconstrained case. We bridge this gap to improve the gradient mapping complexity for constrained convex-concave min-max problems to O(ε−2). We then extend to prove the same complexity for problems without the bounded variance, by using the Blum-Gladyshev assumption.