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Global Solutions to Nonconvex Problems by Evolution of Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs

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  • 1. Typal Research, Typal LLC, Los Angeles, USA;
    2. Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, USA;
    3. Department Mathematics, UCLA, Los Angeles, USA

Received date: 2022-06-01

  Revised date: 2022-10-08

  Accepted date: 2022-11-21

  Online published: 2023-03-20

Supported by

This work greatly benefited from feedback by anonymous reviewers. HH, SWF, and SO were partially funded by AFOSR MURI FA9550-18-502, ONR N00014-18-1-2527, N00014-18-20-1-2093, N00014-20-1-2787. HH was also supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1650604.

Abstract

Computing tasks may often be posed as optimization problems. The objective functions for real-world scenarios are often nonconvex and/or nondifferentiable. State-of-the-art methods for solving these problems typically only guarantee convergence to local minima. This work presents Hamilton-Jacobi-based Moreau adaptive descent (HJ-MAD), a zero-order algorithm with guaranteed convergence to global minima, assuming continuity of the objective function. The core idea is to compute gradients of the Moreau envelope of the objective (which is “piece-wise convex”) with adaptive smoothing parameters. Gradients of the Moreau envelope (i.e., proximal operators) are approximated via the Hopf-Lax formula for the viscous Hamilton-Jacobi equation. Our numerical examples illustrate global convergence.

Cite this article

Howard Heaton, Samy Wu Fung, Stanley Osher . Global Solutions to Nonconvex Problems by Evolution of Hamilton-Jacobi PDEs[J]. Communications on Applied Mathematics and Computation, 2024 , 6(2) : 790 -810 . DOI: 10.1007/s42967-022-00239-5

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