Revisiting Area Convexity: Faster Box-Simplex Games and Spectrahedral Generalizations

Authors: Arun Jambulapati, Kevin Tian

NeurIPS 2023 | Conference PDF | Archive PDF | Plain Text | LLM Run Details

Reproducibility Variable Result LLM Response
Research Type Theoretical We investigate different aspects of area convexity [She17], a mysterious tool introduced to tackle optimization problems under the challenging ℓ geometry. We develop a deeper understanding of its relationship with more conventional analyses of extragradient methods [Nem04, Nes07]. We also give improved solvers for the subproblems required by variants of the [She17] algorithm, designed through the lens of relative smoothness [BBT17, LFN18]. Leveraging these new tools, we give a state-of-the-art first-order algorithm for solving box-simplex games (a primal-dual formulation of ℓ regression) in a d n matrix with bounded rows, using O(log d ϵ 1) matrix-vector queries. Our solver yields improved runtimes for approximate maximum flow, optimal transport, min-mean-cycle, and other basic combinatorial optimization problems. We also develop a near-linear time algorithm for a matrix generalization of box-simplex games, capturing a family of problems closely related to semidefinite programs recently used as subroutines in robust statistics and numerical linear algebra.
Researcher Affiliation Collaboration Arun Jambulapati Simons Institute jmblpati@berkeley.edu Kevin Tian University of Texas at Austin kjtian@cs.utexas.edu Work completed at the University of Washington. Work completed at Microsoft Research.
Pseudocode Yes Algorithm 1: Conceptual Box Simplex(A, b, c, Ograd, Oxgrad) [...] Algorithm 2: Grad Step Oracle(z, v, α, β) [...] Algorithm 3: XGrad Step Oracle(z, v, y, α, β)
Open Source Code No The paper does not provide any statement about making its source code available or a link to a code repository for the described methodology.
Open Datasets No The paper is theoretical, focusing on algorithm design and runtime complexity, rather than empirical studies on specific datasets. Therefore, it does not mention training on publicly available datasets.
Dataset Splits No The paper is theoretical and focuses on algorithm design and analysis. It does not describe experiments with dataset splits for training, validation, or testing.
Hardware Specification No The paper is theoretical and discusses algorithm complexity and runtime, but it does not specify any hardware used for running experiments.
Software Dependencies No The paper focuses on theoretical algorithm design and analysis. It does not mention any specific software dependencies with version numbers.
Experiment Setup No The paper is theoretical and describes algorithms and their complexity. It does not include specific experimental setup details such as hyperparameters, optimization settings, or training configurations.