Projected proximal gradient trust-region algorithm for nonsmooth optimization

Abstract: We consider trust-region methods for solving optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth, nonconvex function and a nonsmooth, convex regularizer. We extend the global convergence theory of such methods to include worst-case complexity bounds in the case of unbounded model Hessian growth, and introduce a new, simple nonsmooth trust-region subproblem solver based on combining several iterations of proximal gradient descent with a single projection into the trust region, which meets the sufficient descent requirements for algorithm convergence and has promising numerical results.