Adaptive Third-Order Methods for Composite Convex Optimization

Abstract: In this paper we propose third-order methods for composite convex optimization problems in which the smooth part is a three-times continuously differentiable function with Lipschitz continuous third-order derivatives. The methods are adaptive in the sense that they do not require the knowledge of the Lipschitz constant. Trial points are computed by the inexact minimization of models that consist in the nonsmooth part of the objective plus a quartic regularization of third-order Taylor polynomial of the smooth part. Specifically, approximate solutions of the auxiliary problems are obtained by using a Bregman gradient method as inner solver. Different from existing adaptive approaches for high-order methods, in our new schemes the regularization parameters are adjusted taking into account the progress of the inner solver. With this technique, we show that the basic method finds an $\epsilon$-approximate minimizer of the objective function performing at most $\mathcal{O}\left(|\log(\epsilon)|\epsilon^{-\frac{1}{3}}\right)$ iterations of the inner solver. An accelerated adaptive third-order method is also presented with total inner iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}\left(|\log(\epsilon)|\epsilon^{-\frac{1}{4}}\right)$.