On Accelerated Methods for Saddle-Point Problems with Composite Structure

Abstract: We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite terms, one of which having finite-sum structure. For this setting we propose a variance reduction algorithm with complexity estimates superior to the existing bounds in the literature. Second, we consider finite-sum saddle-point problems with composite terms and propose several algorithms depending on the properties of the composite terms. When the composite terms are smooth we obtain better complexity bounds than the ones in the literature, including the bounds of a recently proposed nearly-optimal algorithms which do not consider the composite structure of the problem. If the composite terms are prox-friendly, we propose a variance reduction algorithm that, on the one hand, is accelerated compared to existing variance reduction algorithms and, on the other hand, provides in the composite setting similar complexity bounds to the nearly-optimal algorithm which is designed for non-composite setting. Besides that, our algorithms allow to separate the complexity bounds, i.e. estimate, for each part of the objective separately, the number of oracle calls that is sufficient to achieve a given accuracy. This is important since different parts can have different arithmetic complexity of the oracle, and it is desired to call expensive oracles less often than cheap oracles. The key thing to all these results is our general framework for saddle-point problems, which may be of independent interest. This framework, in turn is based on our proposed Accelerated Meta-Algorithm for composite optimization with probabilistic inexact oracles and probabilistic inexactness in the proximal mapping, which may be of independent interest as well.