Mohammad Khalafi

Mohammad Khalafi, Digvijay Boob

We investigate a primal-dual (PD) method for the saddle point problem (SPP) that uses a linear approximation of the primal function instead of the standard proximal step, resulting in a linearized PD (LPD) method. For convex-strongly concave SPP, we observe that the LPD method has a suboptimal dependence on the Lipschitz constant of the primal function. To fix this issue, we combine features of Accelerated Gradient Descent with the LPD method resulting in a single-loop Accelerated Linearized Primal-Dual (ALPD) method. ALPD method achieves the optimal gradient complexity when the SPP has a semi-linear coupling function. We also present an inexact ALPD method for SPPs with a general nonlinear coupling function that maintains the optimal gradient evaluations of the primal parts and significantly improves the gradient evaluations of the coupling term compared to the ALPD method. We verify our findings with numerical experiments.

Digvijay Boob, Qi Deng, Mohammad Khalafi

The monotone Variational Inequality (VI) is a general model with important applications in various engineering and scientific domains. In numerous instances, the VI problems are accompanied by function constraints that can be data-driven, making the usual projection operator challenging to compute. This paper presents novel first-order methods for the function-constrained Variational Inequality (FCVI) problem in smooth or nonsmooth settings with possibly stochastic operators and constraints. We introduce the AdOpEx method, which employs an operator extrapolation on the KKT operator of the FCVI in a smooth deterministic setting. Since this operator is not uniformly Lipschitz continuous in the Lagrange multipliers, we employ an adaptive two-timescale algorithm leading to bounded multipliers and achieving the optimal $O(1/T)$ convergence rate. For the nonsmooth and stochastic VIs, we introduce design changes to the AdOpEx method and propose a novel P-OpEx method that takes partial extrapolation. It converges at the rate of $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ when both the operator and constraints are stochastic or nonsmooth. This method has suboptimal dependence on the noise and Lipschitz constants of function constraints. We propose a constraint extrapolation approach leading to the OpConEx method that improves this dependence by an order of magnitude. All our algorithms easily extend to saddle point problems with function constraints that couple the primal and dual variables while maintaining the same complexity results. To the best of our knowledge, all our complexity results are new in the literature