Long-Time Analysis of Stochastic Heavy Ball Dynamics for Convex Optimization and Monotone Equations

Abstract

In a separable real Hilbert space, we study the problem of minimizing a convex function with Lipschitz continuous gradient in the presence of noisy evaluations. To this end, we associate a stochastic Heavy Ball system, incorporating a friction coefficient, with the optimization problem. We establish existence and uniqueness of trajectory solutions for this system. Under a square integrability condition for the diffusion term, we prove almost sure convergence of the trajectory process to an optimal solution, as well as almost sure convergence of its time derivative to zero. Moreover, we derive almost sure and expected convergence rates for the function values along the trajectory towards the infimal value. Finally, we show that the stochastic Heavy Ball system is equivalent to a Su-Boyd-Candès-type system for a suitable choice of the parameter function, and we provide corresponding convergence rate results for the latter. In the second part of this paper, we extend our analysis beyond the optimization framework and investigate a monotone equation induced by a monotone and Lipschitz continuous operator, whose evaluations are assumed to be corrupted by noise. As before, we consider a stochastic Heavy Ball system with a friction coefficient and a correction term, now augmented by an additional component that accounts for the time derivative of the operator. We establish analogous convergence results for both the trajectory process and its time derivative, and derive almost sure as well as expected convergence rates for the decay of the residual and the gap function along the trajectory. As a final result, we show that a particular instance of the stochastic Heavy Ball system for monotone equations is equivalent to a stochastic second-order dynamical system with a vanishing damping term. Remarkably, this system exhibits fast convergence rates for both the residual and gap functions.