Stable Movement for Nondual Lipschitz Convex Optimization: Efficiency and Nearly Optimal Oracle Rates

We study efficient algorithms for realizing the first-order oracle complexity of optimization of G-Lipschitz convex functions with respect to the ℓq-norm over an ℓp-ball of radius R, where 1≤ p,q≤ ∞. For p<q, we obtain error widetildeOp,q(GR/T^1/p-(1/q-1/2)+) after T oracle queries, efficiently realizing the nearly optimal rates of (MBG+26), thereby resolving the nonsmooth end of the COLT 2015 open problem (Guz15b). In particular, the rate is widetildeO(GR/T) for Euclidean Lipschitzness over an ℓ1-ball of radius R (p=1,q=2). Our solution consists of reducing convex Lipschitz optimization to the chasing nested convex sets problem in sublevel sets of an evolving bundle (LNN95; BBE+20): at each query we either find a point with low function value or we produce a deep cut in the current sublevel of the bundle, that we chase. The dichotomy between stability of selectors and forced movement by deep cuts bounds the number of iterations of the algorithm near optimally. For nested subsets of R Bpd, we introduce a novel notion of stable center whose movement is bounded by widetildeOp,q(RT^1-1/p+(1/q-1/2)+) in the ℓq-norm after T steps, which we show is nearly optimal in high dimensions. A Monte Carlo average of the proposed selector achieves near-optimal rates with high probability and can be implemented in polynomial time for our optimization algorithm in the real-arithmetic model.