Papers › A Limited-Memory Quasi-Newton Algorithm for Bound-Constrained Nonsmooth Optimization

A Limited-Memory Quasi-Newton Algorithm for Bound-Constrained Nonsmooth Optimization

21 Dec 2016arXiv:1612.07350links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Nitish Shirish Keskar, Andreas Waechter

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

We consider the problem of minimizing a continuous function that may be nonsmooth and nonconvex, subject to bound constraints. We propose an algorithm that uses the L-BFGS quasi-Newton approximation of the problem's curvature together with a variant of the weak Wolfe line search. The key ingredient of the method is an active-set selection strategy that defines the subspace in which search directions are computed. To overcome the inherent shortsightedness of the gradient for a nonsmooth function, we propose two strategies. The first relies on an approximation of the ϵ-minimum norm subgradient, and the second uses an iterative corrective loop that augments the active set based on the resulting search directions. We describe a Python implementation of the proposed algorithm and present numerical results on a set of standard test problems to illustrate the efficacy of our approach.

PaperPDFCode

Code

keskarnitish/NQN officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections