Distributed saddle-point subgradient algorithms with Laplacian averaging

Abstract: We present distributed subgradient methods for min-max problems with agreement constraints on a subset of the arguments of both the convex and concave parts. Applications include constrained minimization problems where each constraint is a sum of convex functions in the local variables of the agents. In the latter case, the proposed algorithm reduces to primal-dual updates using local subgradients and Laplacian averaging on local copies of the multipliers associated to the global constraints. For the case of general convex-concave saddle-point problems, our analysis establishes the convergence of the running time-averages of the local estimates to a saddle point under periodic connectivity of the communication digraphs. Specifically, choosing the gradient step-sizes in a suitable way, we show that the evaluation error is proportional to $1/\sqrt{t}$, where $t$ is the iteration step. We illustrate our results in simulation for an optimization scenario with nonlinear constraints coupling the decisions of agents that cannot communicate directly.