Accelerated Distance-adaptive Methods for Hölder Smooth and Convex Optimization

This paper introduces new parameter-free first-order methods for convex optimization problems in which the objective function exhibits Hölder smoothness. Inspired by the recently proposed distance-over-gradient (DOG) technique, we propose an accelerated distance-adaptive method which achieves optimal anytime convergence rates for Hölder smooth problems without requiring prior knowledge of smoothness parameters or explicit parameter tuning.

Importantly, our parameter-free approach removes the necessity of specifying target accuracy in advance, addressing a significant limitation found in the universal fast gradient methods (Nesterov, 2015). We further present a parameter-free accelerated method that eliminates the need for line-search procedures and extend it to convex stochastic optimization.

Preliminary experimental results highlight the effectiveness of our approach in convex nonsmooth problems and its advantages over existing parameter-free or accelerated methods.