Accelerated Gradient Flow with Endogenous Gradient-Memory Anchor: Selection and Restoring Damping

Abstract: We introduce an accelerated gradient flow with an endogenous gradient-memory anchor and a nonlinear restoring--damping feedback. The anchor evolves from a weighted history of the gradients, while the nonlinear feedback is modulated by the squared coordinatewise displacement from the anchor. The resulting dynamics uses only first-order information from the objective function and does not involve explicit Hessian information. Under suitable assumptions, we establish global existence and uniqueness of strong solutions. A Lyapunov analysis yields the accelerated objective-value estimate $F(x(t))-F<sup>\star=\mathcal{O}(t<sup>{-2})$, with the nonlinear restoring--damping term contributing additional dissipation. Under similar assumptions, the primal trajectory converges strongly to a minimizer. When, in addition, the solution set $S$ is affine, the limit is identified explicitly as the Euclidean projection $P_S(z_0)$ of the initial anchor $z_0$ onto $S$. In particular, for rank-deficient least-squares problems, the dynamics selects the least-squares solution closest to $z_0$. We also establish a finite weighted dissipation estimate for the phase variable. Moreover, in coordinates where the nonlinear feedback is active, if the trajectory remains separated from the anchor over an interval, then the corresponding homogeneous phase dynamics acquires an additional polynomial decay factor. Numerical experiments illustrate the minimizer-selection, accelerated objective-value decay, and restoring--damping mechanisms.