A Novel First-order Method with Event-driven Objective Evaluations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Varner, Christian, Patel, Vivak
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Varner, Christian
Patel, Vivak
author_facet Varner, Christian
Patel, Vivak
contents Arising in semi-parametric statistics, control applications, and as sub-problems in global optimization methods, certain optimization problems can have objective functions requiring numerical integration to evaluate, yet gradient function evaluations that are relatively cheap. For such problems, typical optimization methods that require multiple evaluations of the objective for each new iterate become computationally expensive. In light of this, optimization methods that avoid objective function evaluations are attractive, yet we show anti-convergence behavior for these methods on the problem class of interest. To address this gap, we develop a novel gradient algorithm that only evaluates the objective function when specific events are triggered and propose a step size scheme that greedily takes advantage of the properties induced by these triggering events. We prove that our methodology has global convergence guarantees under the most general smoothness conditions, and show through extensive numerical results that our method performs favorably on optimization problems arising in semi-parametric statistics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_03526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Novel First-order Method with Event-driven Objective Evaluations
Varner, Christian
Patel, Vivak
Optimization and Control
Computation
90C30, 65K05, 68T09
Arising in semi-parametric statistics, control applications, and as sub-problems in global optimization methods, certain optimization problems can have objective functions requiring numerical integration to evaluate, yet gradient function evaluations that are relatively cheap. For such problems, typical optimization methods that require multiple evaluations of the objective for each new iterate become computationally expensive. In light of this, optimization methods that avoid objective function evaluations are attractive, yet we show anti-convergence behavior for these methods on the problem class of interest. To address this gap, we develop a novel gradient algorithm that only evaluates the objective function when specific events are triggered and propose a step size scheme that greedily takes advantage of the properties induced by these triggering events. We prove that our methodology has global convergence guarantees under the most general smoothness conditions, and show through extensive numerical results that our method performs favorably on optimization problems arising in semi-parametric statistics.
title A Novel First-order Method with Event-driven Objective Evaluations
topic Optimization and Control
Computation
90C30, 65K05, 68T09
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03526