Accelerated Over-Relaxation Heavy-Ball Method: Achieving Global Accelerated Convergence with Broad Generalization

Abstract

The heavy-ball momentum method accelerates gradient descent with a momentum term but lacks accelerated convergence for general smooth strongly convex problems. This work introduces the Accelerated Over-Relaxation Heavy-Ball (AOR-HB) method, the first variant with provable global and accelerated convergence for such problems. AOR-HB closes a long-standing theoretical gap, extends to composite convex optimization and min-max problems, and achieves optimal complexity bounds. It offers three key advantages: (1) broad generalization ability, (2) potential to reshape acceleration techniques, and (3) conceptual clarity and elegance compared to existing methods.