Direct Spectral Acceleration of First-Order Methods for Saddle Point Problems with Bilinear Coupling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Li, Meng, Grigas, Paul
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Li, Meng
Grigas, Paul
author_facet Li, Meng
Grigas, Paul
contents We study convex-concave saddle point problems with bilinear coupling, covering linearly constrained convex optimization and more general nonsmooth or constrained models via a proximable term in the dual objective. In linearly convergent regimes, we characterize how spectral properties of the coupling matrix and objective conditioning jointly determine the attainable linear rates. We propose direct spectral acceleration for first-order primal--dual methods for a class of bilinear-coupled saddle point problems, including affinely constrained smooth strongly convex optimization and extensions with proximable dual terms. The resulting algorithms distinguish objective-dominated and coupling matrix-dominated regimes and attain optimal linear convergence without Chebyshev inner loops or double-loop designs. We further develop stochastic block-coordinate extensions in the affinely constrained case with separable objectives; we also establish optimal linear rates matching the block-coordinate lower bound. For both deterministic and stochastic methods, we provide matching worst-case lower bounds via explicit finite-dimensional hard instances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_23727
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Direct Spectral Acceleration of First-Order Methods for Saddle Point Problems with Bilinear Coupling
Li, Meng
Grigas, Paul
Optimization and Control
We study convex-concave saddle point problems with bilinear coupling, covering linearly constrained convex optimization and more general nonsmooth or constrained models via a proximable term in the dual objective. In linearly convergent regimes, we characterize how spectral properties of the coupling matrix and objective conditioning jointly determine the attainable linear rates. We propose direct spectral acceleration for first-order primal--dual methods for a class of bilinear-coupled saddle point problems, including affinely constrained smooth strongly convex optimization and extensions with proximable dual terms. The resulting algorithms distinguish objective-dominated and coupling matrix-dominated regimes and attain optimal linear convergence without Chebyshev inner loops or double-loop designs. We further develop stochastic block-coordinate extensions in the affinely constrained case with separable objectives; we also establish optimal linear rates matching the block-coordinate lower bound. For both deterministic and stochastic methods, we provide matching worst-case lower bounds via explicit finite-dimensional hard instances.
title Direct Spectral Acceleration of First-Order Methods for Saddle Point Problems with Bilinear Coupling
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.23727