We investigate a globalized inexact semismooth Newton method applied to strongly convex optimization problems in Hilbert spaces. Here, the semismooth Newton method is appplied to the dual problem, which has a continuously differentiable objective. We prove global strong convergence of iterates as well as transition to local superlinear convergence. The latter needs a second-order Taylor expansion involving semismooth derivative concepts. The convergence of the globalized method is demonstrated in numerical examples, for which the local unglobalized method diverges.

We investigate bang-bang control problems and the possibility to apply Newton's method to solve such kind of problems numerically. To this end, we show that the signum function is Fréchet differentiable between appropriate function spaces. Numerical experiments show the applicability of the resulting method.

We investigate time-dependent optimization problems in fractional Sobolev spaces with the sparsity promoting $L^p$-pseudo norm for $0

We consider constraints on the measure of the support for integrable functions on arbitrary measure spaces. It is shown that this non-convex and discontinuous constraint can be equivalently reformulated by the difference of two convex and continuous functions, namely the $L^1$-norm and the so-called largest-$K$-norm. The largest-$K$-norm is studied and its convex subdifferential is derived. A corresponding penalty method is proposed, and its numerical solution by a DC method is investigated. Numerical experiments for two example problems, including a sparse optimal control problem, are presented.

We consider nonsmooth optimal control problems subject to a linear elliptic partial differential equation with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. It is well-known that local solutions satisfy the celebrated Pontryagin maximum principle. In this note, we will investigate an optimization method that is based on the maximum principle. We prove that the discrepancy in the maximum principle vanishes along the resulting sequence of iterates. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings.

. We consider optimal control problems, where the control appears in the main part of the operator. We derive the Pontryagin maximum principle as a necessary optimality condition. The proof uses the concept of topological derivatives. In contrast to earlier works, we do not need continuity assumptions for the coefficient or gradients of solutions of partial differential equations. Following classical proofs, we consider perturbations of optimal controls by multiples of characteristic functions of sets, whose scaling factor is send to zero. For 2d problems, we can perform an optimization over the elliptic shapes of such sets leading to stronger optimality conditions involving a variational inequality of a new type.

In this paper, we consider optimization problems with L^0-cost of the controls. Here, we take the support of the control as independent optimization variable. Topological derivatives of the corresponding value function with respect to variations of the support are derived. These topological derivatives are used in a novel gradient descent algorithm with Armijo line-search. Under suitable assumptions, the algorithm produces a minimizing sequence.

Testing of hypotheses is a well studied topic in mathematical statistics. Recently, this issue has also been addressed in the context of inverse problems, where the quantity of interest is not directly accessible but only after the inversion of a (potentially) ill-posed operator. In this study, we propose a regularized approach to hypothesis testing in inverse problems in the sense that the underlying estimators (or test statistics) are allowed to be biased. Under mild source-condition type assumptions, we derive a family of tests with prescribed level α and subsequently analyze how to choose the test with maximal power out of this family. As one major result we prove that regularized testing is always at least as good as (classical) unregularized testing. Furthermore, using tools from convex optimization, we provide an adaptive test by maximizing the power functional, which then outperforms previous unregularized tests in numerical simulations by several orders of magnitude.

We consider optimization problems in the fractional order Sobolev spaces with sparsity promoting objective functionals containing L p -pseudonorms, p ∈ ( 0 , 1 ) . Existence of solutions is proven. By means of a smoothing scheme, we obtain first-order optimality conditions, which contain an equation with the fractional Laplace operator. An algorithm based on this smoothing scheme is developed. Weak limit points of iterates are shown to satisfy a stationarity system that is slightly weaker than that given by the necessary condition.

In this paper, we study optimal control problems of semilinear elliptic and parabolic equations. A tracking cost functional, quadratic in the control and state variables, is considered. No control constraints are imposed. We prove that the corresponding state equations are well-posed for controls in $L^2$. However, it is well-known that in the $L^2$ framework the mappings involved in the control problem are not Frechet differentiable in general, which makes any analysis of the optimality conditions challenging. Nevertheless, we prove that every $L^2$ optimal control belongs to $L^\infty$, and consequently standard optimality conditions are available.

We investigate optimal control problems with L^0 constraints, which restrict the measure of the support of the controls. We prove necessary optimality conditions of Pontryagin maximum principle type. Here, a special control perturbation is used that respects the L^0 constraint. First, the maximum principle is obtained in integral form, which is then turned into a pointwise form. In addition, an optimization algorithm of proximal gradient type is analyzed. Under some assumptions, the sequence of iterates contains strongly converging subsequences, whose limits are feasible and satisfy a subset of the necessary optimality conditions.

Motivated by the residual type neural networks (ResNet), this paper studies optimal control problems constrained by a non-smooth integral equation associated to a fractional differential equation. Such non-smooth equations, for instance, arise in the continuous representation of fractional deep neural networks (DNNs). Here the underlying non-differentiable function is the ReLU or max function. The control enters in a nonlinear and multiplicative manner and we additionally impose control constraints. Because of the presence of the non-differentiable mapping, the application of standard adjoint calculus is excluded. We derive strong stationary conditions by relying on the limited differentiability properties of the non-smooth map. While traditional approaches smoothen the non-differentiable function, no such smoothness is retained in our final strong stationarity system. Thus, this work also closes a gap which currently exists in continuous neural networks with ReLU type activation function.

We give a simple proof of the Baillon-Haddad theorem for convex functions defined on open and convex subsets of Hilbert spaces. We also state some generalizations and limitations. In particular, we discuss equivalent characterizations of the Lipschitz continuity of the derivative of convex functions on open and convex subsets of Banach spaces.

We study no-gap second-order optimality conditions for a non-uniformly convex and non-smooth integral functional. The integral functional is extended to the space of measures. The obtained second-order derivatives contain integrals on lower-dimensional manifolds. The proofs utilize the convex pre-conjugate, which is an integral functional on the space of continuous functions. Applications to non-smooth optimal control problems are given.

We consider the optimal control of a differential equation that involves the suprema of the state over some part of the history. In many applications, this non-smooth functional dependence is crucial for the successful modeling of real-world phenomena. We prove the existence of solutions and show that related problems may not possess optimal controls. Due to the non-smoothness in the state equation, we cannot obtain optimality conditions via standard theory. Therefore, we regularize the problem via a novel LogIntExp functional which generalizes the well-known LogSumExp. By passing to the limit with the regularization, we obtain an optimality system for the original problem. The theory is illustrated by some numerical experiments.

We investigate the convergence of the proximal gradient method applied to control problems with non-smooth and non-convex control cost. Here, we focus on control cost functionals that promote sparsity, which includes functionals of L^p -type for p∈ [0,1) . We prove stationarity properties of weak limit points of the method. These properties are weaker than those provided by Pontryagin’s maximum principle and weaker than L -stationarity.

We investigate non-convex optimization problems in BV (Ω) with two-sided pointwise inequality constraints. We propose a regularization and penalization method to numerically solve the problem. Under certain conditions, weak limit points of iterates are stationary for the original problem. In addition, we prove optimality conditions for the original problem that contain Lagrange multipliers to the inequality constraints. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical findings.

The paper studies generalized differentiability properties of the marginal function of parametric optimal control problems of semilinear elliptic partial differential equations. We establish upper estimates for the regular and the limiting subgradients of the marginal function. With some additional assumptions, we show that the solution map of the perturbed optimal control problems has local upper Hölderian selections. This leads to a lower estimate for the regular subdifferential of the marginal function.

In this paper we apply an augmented Lagrange method to a class of semilinear elliptic optimal control problems with pointwise state constraints. We show strong convergence of subsequences of the primal variables to a local solution of the original problem as well as weak convergence of the adjoint states and weak* convergence of the multipliers associated to the state constraint. Moreover, we show existence of stationary points in arbitrary small neighborhoods of local solutions of the original problem. Additionally, various numerical results are presented.