An efficient penalty decomposition algorithm for minimization over sparse symmetric sets

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mousavi, Ahmad, Kimiaei, Morteza, Babaie-Kafaki, Saman, Kungurtsev, Vyacheslav
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Mousavi, Ahmad
Kimiaei, Morteza
Babaie-Kafaki, Saman
Kungurtsev, Vyacheslav
author_facet Mousavi, Ahmad
Kimiaei, Morteza
Babaie-Kafaki, Saman
Kungurtsev, Vyacheslav
contents This paper proposes an improved quasi-Newton penalty decomposition algorithm for the minimization of continuously differentiable functions, possibly nonconvex, over sparse symmetric sets. The method solves a sequence of penalty subproblems approximately via a two-block decomposition scheme: the first subproblem admits a closed-form solution without sparsity constraints, while the second subproblem is handled through an efficient sparse projection over the symmetric feasible set. Under a new assumption on the gradient of the objective function, weaker than global Lipschitz continuity from the origin, we establish that accumulation points of the outer iterates are basic feasible and cardinality-constrained Mordukhovich stationarity points. To ensure robustness and efficiency in finite-precision arithmetic, the algorithm incorporates several practical enhancements, including an enhanced line search strategy based on either backtracking or extrapolation, and four inexpensive diagonal Hessian approximations derived from differences of previous iterates and gradients or from eigenvalue-distribution information. Numerical experiments on a diverse benchmark of $30$ synthetic and data-driven test problems, including machine-learning datasets from the UCI repository and sparse symmetric instances with dimensions ranging from $10$ to $500$, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with several state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, robustness, and strong stationarity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12383
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An efficient penalty decomposition algorithm for minimization over sparse symmetric sets
Mousavi, Ahmad
Kimiaei, Morteza
Babaie-Kafaki, Saman
Kungurtsev, Vyacheslav
Optimization and Control
90C30
This paper proposes an improved quasi-Newton penalty decomposition algorithm for the minimization of continuously differentiable functions, possibly nonconvex, over sparse symmetric sets. The method solves a sequence of penalty subproblems approximately via a two-block decomposition scheme: the first subproblem admits a closed-form solution without sparsity constraints, while the second subproblem is handled through an efficient sparse projection over the symmetric feasible set. Under a new assumption on the gradient of the objective function, weaker than global Lipschitz continuity from the origin, we establish that accumulation points of the outer iterates are basic feasible and cardinality-constrained Mordukhovich stationarity points. To ensure robustness and efficiency in finite-precision arithmetic, the algorithm incorporates several practical enhancements, including an enhanced line search strategy based on either backtracking or extrapolation, and four inexpensive diagonal Hessian approximations derived from differences of previous iterates and gradients or from eigenvalue-distribution information. Numerical experiments on a diverse benchmark of $30$ synthetic and data-driven test problems, including machine-learning datasets from the UCI repository and sparse symmetric instances with dimensions ranging from $10$ to $500$, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is competitive with several state-of-the-art methods in terms of efficiency, robustness, and strong stationarity.
title An efficient penalty decomposition algorithm for minimization over sparse symmetric sets
topic Optimization and Control
90C30
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12383