Projection-free nonconvex stochastic optimization on Riemannian manifolds

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>We study stochastic projection-free methods for constrained optimization of smooth functions on Riemannian manifolds, i.e., with additional constraints beyond the parameter domain being a manifold. Specifically, we introduce...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Weber, Melanie, Sra, Suvrit
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Oxford University Press (OUP) 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/143899
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Summary:<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>We study stochastic projection-free methods for constrained optimization of smooth functions on Riemannian manifolds, i.e., with additional constraints beyond the parameter domain being a manifold. Specifically, we introduce stochastic Riemannian Frank–Wolfe (Fw) methods for nonconvex and geodesically convex problems. We present algorithms for both purely stochastic optimization and finite-sum problems. For the latter, we develop variance-reduced methods, including a Riemannian adaptation of the recently proposed Spider technique. For all settings, we recover convergence rates that are comparable to the best-known rates for their Euclidean counterparts. Finally, we discuss applications to two classic tasks: the computation of the Karcher mean of positive definite matrices and Wasserstein barycenters for multivariate normal distributions. For both tasks, stochastic Fw methods yield state-of-the-art empirical performance.</jats:p>