KKT Conditions, First-Order and Second-Order Optimization, and Distributed Optimization: Tutorial and Survey

TL;DR

This tutorial and survey comprehensively reviews optimization theory, techniques, and algorithms, including KKT conditions, first- and second-order methods, and distributed optimization, providing a detailed overview for researchers and practitioners.

Contribution

It offers an extensive, organized overview of optimization methods, including recent advances in first- and second-order algorithms and their applications in distributed settings.

Findings

Detailed explanation of KKT conditions and duality principles.

Comparison of first-order methods like gradient descent and Adam.

Discussion of second-order methods and their convergence properties.

Abstract

This is a tutorial and survey paper on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, first-order and second-order numerical optimization, and distributed optimization. After a brief review of history of optimization, we start with some preliminaries on properties of sets, norms, functions, and concepts of optimization. Then, we introduce the optimization problem, standard optimization problems (including linear programming, quadratic programming, and semidefinite programming), and convex problems. We also introduce some techniques such as eliminating inequality, equality, and set constraints, adding slack variables, and epigraph form. We introduce Lagrangian function, dual variables, KKT conditions (including primal feasibility, dual feasibility, weak and strong duality, complementary slackness, and stationarity condition), and solving optimization by method of Lagrange multipliers. Then, we cover first-order optimization including gradient descent, line-search, convergence of gradient methods, momentum, steepest descent, and backpropagation. Other first-order methods are explained, such as accelerated gradient method, stochastic gradient descent, mini-batch gradient descent, stochastic average gradient, stochastic variance reduced gradient, AdaGrad, RMSProp, and Adam optimizer, proximal methods (including proximal mapping, proximal point algorithm, and proximal gradient method), and constrained gradient methods (including projected gradient method, projection onto convex sets, and Frank-Wolfe method). We also cover non-smooth and $\ell_1$ optimization methods including lasso regularization, convex conjugate, Huber function, soft-thresholding, coordinate descent, and subgradient methods. Then, we explain second-order methods including Newton's method for unconstrained, equality constrained, and inequality constrained problems....