Anchored Extra-Proximal Methods: Optimal Higher-Order Methods for Monotone Inclusion Problems

Abstract: We study the deterministic oracle complexity of finding approximate solutions to composite monotone inclusion problems, formed by the sum of a smooth single-valued monotone operator and a maximally monotone set-valued operator, under the tangent-residual criterion. We introduce the Anchored Extra-Proximal (AEP) framework, which combines an anchored extrapolation step with an inexact anchored proximal update satisfying a relative-error condition. The framework recovers the composite Fast Extragradient method in the first-order setting and yields natural second- and higher-order extensions by replacing the operator in the implicit update with its Taylor approximation at the extrapolated point. For every $p\geq 2$, assuming that the $(p-1)$th derivative of the single-valued operator is Lipschitz continuous, we combine this construction with a bisection line search to obtain a $p$th-order method that finds a point with tangent residual at most $\varepsilon$ in $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon<sup>{-2/(3p-1)})$ oracle calls. This improves all prior upper bounds for $p$th-order methods: in particular, it improves the previous best-known $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon<sup>{-1/p})$ tangent-residual complexity as well as the classical $O(\varepsilon<sup>{-2/(p+1)})$ bound of higher-order hybrid proximal extragradient methods under the weaker duality-gap criterion. We complement this result with a worst-case lower bound of $Ω(\varepsilon<sup>{-2/(3p-1)})$ for every deterministic algorithm in the $p$th-order oracle model, without restricting the algorithm to tensor steps or any other prescribed update structure. Thus, the proposed method attains the optimal dependence on $\varepsilon$, up to logarithmic factors, for all $p\geq2$.