A globally and superlinearly convergent QO-free method for nonlinear optimization on Riemannian manifolds

Abstract

The quadratic optimization-free (QO-free) method is a class of powerful and effective algorithms for solving nonlinearly constrained optimization problems in Euclidean spaces. The aim of the present work is to extend this method to solve optimization problems on manifolds with additional equality and inequality constraints. We first present a specific algorithm in the manifold setting. At each iteration, three linear systems sharing a common linear operator are solved to determine the master search direction. In addition, a higher-order correction direction is obtained by solving a reduced linear least squares subproblem to circumvent the Maratos effect which is assumed not to arise in existing related literature. A Riemannian arc search is then performed within the tangent space of the current iterate to generate the new iterate. Under appropriate assumptions, we establish the global and strong convergence of the proposed method. Moreover, we prove that the unit step size will eventually be accepted by the arc search, upon which the superlinear convergence of the algorithm is established. Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method is very competitive compared with other existing approaches.