Nonsmooth spectral gradient methods for unconstrained optimization

Abstract

To solve nonsmooth unconstrained minimization problems, we combine the spectral choice of step length with two well-established subdifferential-type schemes: the gradient sampling method and the simplex gradient method. We focus on the interesting case in which the objective function is continuously differentiable almost everywhere, and it is of- ten not differentiable at minimizers. In the case of the gradient sampling method, we also present a simple differentiability test that allows us to use the exact gradient direction as frequently as possible, and to build a stochastic subdifferential direction only if the test fails. The proposed spectral gradient sampling method is combined with a monotone line search globalization strategy. On the other hand, the simplex gradient method is a direct search method that only requires function evaluations to build an approximation to the gradient direction. In this case, the proposed spectral simplex gradient method is combined with a suitable nonmonotone line search strategy. For both scenarios, we present preliminary nu- merical results on a set of nonsmooth test functions. These numerical results indicate that using a spectral step length can improve the practical performance of both methods.