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Ahmet Alacaoglu

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13 papers

2 author rows

ICML Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Stochastic Smoothed Primal-Dual Algorithms for Nonconvex Optimization with Linear Inequality Constraints

Ruichuan Huang
Jiawei Zhang
Ahmet Alacaoglu

We propose smoothed primal-dual algorithms for solving stochastic nonconvex optimization problems with linear inequality constraints. Our algorithms are single-loop and only require a single (or two) samples of stochastic gradients at each iteration. A defining feature of our algorithm is that it is based on an inexact gradient descent framework for the Moreau envelope, where the gradient of the Moreau envelope is estimated using one step of a stochastic primal-dual (linearized) augmented Lagrangian algorithm. To handle inequality constraints and stochasticity, we combine the recently established global error bounds in constrained optimization with a Moreau envelope-based analysis of stochastic proximal algorithms. We establish the optimal (in their respective cases) $O(\varepsilon^{-4})$ and $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ sample complexity guarantees for our algorithms and provide extensions to stochastic linear constraints. Unlike existing methods, iterations of our algorithms are free of subproblems, large batch sizes or increasing penalty parameters in their iterations and they use dual variable updates to ensure feasibility.

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ICML Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Revisiting Inexact Fixed-Point Iterations for Min-Max Problems: Stochasticity and Structured Nonconvexity

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Donghwan Kim
Stephen J. Wright 0001

We focus on constrained, $L$-smooth, potentially stochastic and nonconvex-nonconcave min-max problems either satisfying $\rho$-cohypomonotonicity or admitting a solution to the $\rho$-weakly Minty Variational Inequality (MVI), where larger values of the parameter $\rho>0$ correspond to a greater degree of nonconvexity. These problem classes include examples in two player reinforcement learning, interaction dominant min-max problems, and certain synthetic test problems on which classical min-max algorithms fail. It has been conjectured that first-order methods can tolerate a value of $\rho$ no larger than $\frac{1}{L}$, but existing results in the literature have stagnated at the tighter requirement $\rho conic nonexpansiveness property of operators. Second, we provide a refined analysis for inexact Halpern iteration that relaxes the required inexactness level to improve some state-of-the-art complexity results even for constrained stochastic convex-concave min-max problems. Third, we analyze a stochastic inexact Krasnosel’skii-Mann iteration with a multilevel Monte Carlo estimator when the assumptions only hold with respect to a solution.

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Variance Reduced Halpern Iteration for Finite-Sum Monotone Inclusions

Xufeng Cai
Ahmet Alacaoglu
Jelena Diakonikolas

Machine learning approaches relying on such criteria as adversarial robustness or multi-agent settings have raised the need for solving game-theoretic equilibrium problems. Of particular relevance to these applications are methods targeting finite-sum structure, which generically arises in empirical variants of learning problems in these contexts. Further, methods with computable approximation errors are highly desirable, as they provide verifiable exit criteria. Motivated by these applications, we study finite-sum monotone inclusion problems, which model broad classes of equilibrium problems. Our main contributions are variants of the classical Halpern iteration that employ variance reduction to obtain improved complexity guarantees in which $n$ component operators in the finite sum are ``on average'' either cocoercive or Lipschitz continuous and monotone, with parameter $L$. The resulting oracle complexity of our methods, which provide guarantees for the last iterate and for a (computable) operator norm residual, is $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}( n + \sqrt{n}L\varepsilon^{-1})$, which improves upon existing methods by a factor up to $\sqrt{n}$. This constitutes the first variance reduction-type result for general finite-sum monotone inclusions and for more specific problems such as convex-concave optimization when operator norm residual is the optimality measure. We further argue that, up to poly-logarithmic factors, this complexity is unimprovable in the monotone Lipschitz setting; i.e., the provided result is near-optimal.

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JMLR Journal 2023 Journal Article

Beyond the Golden Ratio for Variational Inequality Algorithms

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Axel Böhm
Yura Malitsky

We improve the understanding of the golden ratio algorithm, which solves monotone variational inequalities (VI) and convex-concave min-max problems via the distinctive feature of adapting the step sizes to the local Lipschitz constants. Adaptive step sizes not only eliminate the need to pick hyperparameters, but they also remove the necessity of global Lipschitz continuity and can increase from one iteration to the next. We first establish the equivalence of this algorithm with popular VI methods such as reflected gradient, Popov or optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA) in the unconstrained case with constant step sizes. We then move on to the constrained setting and introduce a new analysis that allows to use larger step sizes, to complete the bridge between the golden ratio algorithm and the existing algorithms in the literature. Doing so, we actually eliminate the link between the golden ratio {$\frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}$} and the algorithm. Moreover, we improve the adaptive version of the algorithm, first by removing the maximum step size hyperparameter (an artifact from the analysis), and secondly, by adjusting it to nonmonotone problems with weak Minty solutions, with superior empirical performance. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2023. ( edit, beta )

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Convergence of First-Order Methods for Constrained Nonconvex Optimization with Dependent Data

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Hanbaek Lyu

We focus on analyzing the classical stochastic projected gradient methods under a general dependent data sampling scheme for constrained smooth nonconvex optimization. We show the worst-case rate of convergence $\tilde{O}(t^{-1/4})$ and complexity $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ for achieving an $\varepsilon$-near stationary point in terms of the norm of the gradient of Moreau envelope and gradient mapping. While classical convergence guarantee requires i. i. d. data sampling from the target distribution, we only require a mild mixing condition of the conditional distribution, which holds for a wide class of Markov chain sampling algorithms. This improves the existing complexity for the constrained smooth nonconvex optimization with dependent data from $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-8})$ to $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ with a significantly simpler analysis. We illustrate the generality of our approach by deriving convergence results with dependent data for stochastic proximal gradient methods, adaptive stochastic gradient algorithm AdaGrad and stochastic gradient algorithm with heavy ball momentum. As an application, we obtain first online nonnegative matrix factorization algorithms for dependent data based on stochastic projected gradient methods with adaptive step sizes and optimal rate of convergence.

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ICML Conference 2022 Conference Paper

A Natural Actor-Critic Framework for Zero-Sum Markov Games

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Luca Viano
Niao He
Volkan Cevher

We introduce algorithms based on natural actor-critic and analyze their sample complexity for solving two player zero-sum Markov games in the tabular case. Our results improve the best-known sample complexities of policy gradient/actor-critic methods for convergence to Nash equilibrium in the multi-agent setting. We use the error propagation scheme in approximate dynamic programming, recent advances for global convergence of policy gradient methods, temporal difference learning, and techniques from stochastic primal-dual optimization. Our algorithms feature two stages, requiring agents to agree on an etiquette before starting their interactions, which is feasible for instance in self-play. However, the agents only access to joint reward and joint next state and not to each other’s actions or policies. Our complexity results match the best-known results for global convergence of policy gradient algorithms for single agent RL. We provide numerical verification of our methods for a two player bandit environment and a two player game, Alesia. We observe improved empirical performance as compared to the recently proposed optimistic gradient descent-ascent variant for Markov games.

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NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Convergence of adaptive algorithms for constrained weakly convex optimization

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Yura Malitsky
Volkan Cevher

We analyze the adaptive first order algorithm AMSGrad, for solving a constrained stochastic optimization problem with a weakly convex objective. We prove the $\mathcal{\tilde O}(t^{-1/2})$ rate of convergence for the squared norm of the gradient of Moreau envelope, which is the standard stationarity measure for this class of problems. It matches the known rates that adaptive algorithms enjoy for the specific case of unconstrained smooth nonconvex stochastic optimization. Our analysis works with mini-batch size of $1$, constant first and second order moment parameters, and possibly unbounded optimization domains. Finally, we illustrate the applications and extensions of our results to specific problems and algorithms.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

A new regret analysis for Adam-type algorithms

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Yura Malitsky
Panayotis Mertikopoulos
Volkan Cevher

In this paper, we focus on a theory-practice gap for Adam and its variants (AMSGrad, AdamNC, etc.). In practice, these algorithms are used with a constant first-order moment parameter $\beta_{1}$ (typically between $0. 9$ and $0. 99$). In theory, regret guarantees for online convex optimization require a rapidly decaying $\beta_{1}\to0$ schedule. We show that this is an artifact of the standard analysis, and we propose a novel framework that allows us to derive optimal, data-dependent regret bounds with a constant $\beta_{1}$, without further assumptions. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our analysis on a wide range of different algorithms and settings.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Conditional gradient methods for stochastically constrained convex minimization

Maria-Luiza Vladarean
Ahmet Alacaoglu
Ya-Ping Hsieh
Volkan Cevher

We propose two novel conditional gradient-based methods for solving structured stochastic convex optimization problems with a large number of linear constraints. Instances of this template naturally arise from SDP-relaxations of combinatorial problems, which involve a number of constraints that is polynomial in the problem dimension. The most important feature of our framework is that only a subset of the constraints is processed at each iteration, thus gaining a computational advantage over prior works that require full passes. Our algorithms rely on variance reduction and smoothing used in conjunction with conditional gradient steps, and are accompanied by rigorous convergence guarantees. Preliminary numerical experiments are provided for illustrating the practical performance of the methods.

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ICML Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Random extrapolation for primal-dual coordinate descent

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Olivier Fercoq
Volkan Cevher

We introduce a randomly extrapolated primal-dual coordinate descent method that adapts to sparsity of the data matrix and the favorable structures of the objective function. Our method updates only a subset of primal and dual variables with sparse data, and it uses large step sizes with dense data, retaining the benefits of the specific methods designed for each case. In addition to adapting to sparsity, our method attains fast convergence guarantees in favorable cases \emph{without any modifications}. In particular, we prove linear convergence under metric subregularity, which applies to strongly convex-strongly concave problems and piecewise linear quadratic functions. We show almost sure convergence of the sequence and optimal sublinear convergence rates for the primal-dual gap and objective values, in the general convex-concave case. Numerical evidence demonstrates the state-of-the-art empirical performance of our method in sparse and dense settings, matching and improving the existing methods.

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ICML Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Almost surely constrained convex optimization

Olivier Fercoq
Ahmet Alacaoglu
Ion Necoara
Volkan Cevher

We propose a stochastic gradient framework for solving stochastic composite convex optimization problems with (possibly) infinite number of linear inclusion constraints that need to be satisfied almost surely. We use smoothing and homotopy techniques to handle constraints without the need for matrix-valued projections. We show for our stochastic gradient algorithm $\mathcal{O}(\log(k)/\sqrt{k})$ convergence rate for general convex objectives and $\mathcal{O}(\log(k)/k)$ convergence rate for restricted strongly convex objectives. These rates are known to be optimal up to logarithmic factor, even without constraints. We conduct numerical experiments on basis pursuit, hard margin support vector machines and portfolio optimization problems and show that our algorithm achieves state-of-the-art practical performance.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

An Inexact Augmented Lagrangian Framework for Nonconvex Optimization with Nonlinear Constraints

Mehmet Fatih Sahin
Armin Eftekhari
Ahmet Alacaoglu
Fabian Latorre
Volkan Cevher

We propose a practical inexact augmented Lagrangian method (iALM) for nonconvex problems with nonlinear constraints. We characterize the total computational complexity of our method subject to a verifiable geometric condition, which is closely related to the Polyak-Lojasiewicz and Mangasarian-Fromowitz conditions. In particular, when a first-order solver is used for the inner iterates, we prove that iALM finds a first-order stationary point with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\epsilon^3)$ calls to the first-order oracle. {If, in addition, the problem is smooth and} a second-order solver is used for the inner iterates, iALM finds a second-order stationary point with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(1/\epsilon^5)$ calls to the second-order oracle. These complexity results match the known theoretical results in the literature. We also provide strong numerical evidence on large-scale machine learning problems, including the Burer-Monteiro factorization of semidefinite programs, and a novel nonconvex relaxation of the standard basis pursuit template. For these examples, we also show how to verify our geometric condition.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Smooth Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent Algorithms for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization

Ahmet Alacaoglu
Quoc Tran Dinh
Olivier Fercoq
Volkan Cevher

We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel combination of four ideas applied to the primal-dual gap function: smoothing, acceleration, homotopy, and coordinate descent with non-uniform sampling. As a result, our method features the first convergence rate guarantees among the coordinate descent methods, that are the best-known under a variety of common structure assumptions on the template. We provide numerical evidence to support the theoretical results with a comparison to state-of-the-art algorithms.

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