Riemannian optimization on the symplectic Stiefel manifold using second-order information

Abstract: Riemannian optimization is concerned with problems, where the independent variable lies on a smooth manifold. There is a number of problems from numerical linear algebra that fall into this category, where the manifold is usually specified by special matrix structures, such as orthogonality or definiteness. Following this line of research, we investigate tools for Riemannian optimization on the symplectic Stiefel manifold. We complement the existing set of numerical optimization algorithms with a Riemannian trust region method tailored to the symplectic Stiefel manifold. To this end, we derive a matrix formula for the Riemannian Hessian under a right-invariant metric. Moreover, we propose a novel retraction for approximating the Riemannian geodesics. Finally, we conduct a comparative study in which we juxtapose the performance of the Riemannian variants of the steepest descent, conjugate gradients, and trust region methods on selected matrix optimization problems that feature symplectic constraints.