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Optimization methods are essential and have been used extensively in a broad spectrum of applications. Most existing literature on optimization algorithms does not consider systems that involve unknown system parameters. This article studies a class of stochastic adaptive optimization problems in which identification of unknown parameters and search for the optimal solutions must be performed simultaneously. Due to a fundamental conflict between parameter identifiability and optimality in such problems, we introduce a method of adding stochastic dither signals into the system, which provide sufficient excitation for estimating the unknown parameters, leading to convergent adaptive optimization algorithms. Joint identification and optimization algorithms are developed and their simultaneous convergence properties of parameter estimation and optimization variable updates are proved. Under both noise-free and noisy observations, the corresponding convergence rates are established. The main results of this article reveal certain fundamental relationships and tradeoff among updating step sizes, dither magnitudes, parameter estimation errors, optimization accuracy, and convergence rates. Simulation case studies are used to illustrate the adaptive optimization algorithms and their main properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the subgradient push method developed recently by Nedić et al. we present a distributed dual averaging push algorithm for constrained nonsmooth convex optimization over time-varying directed graph. Our algorithm combines the dual averaging method with the push-sum technique and achieves an $O(1/ \sqrt{k})$ convergence rate. Compared with the subgradient push algorithm, our algorithm, first, addresses the constrained problems, and, second, has a faster convergence rate, and, third, simplifies the convergence analysis. We also generalize the proposed algorithm so that input variables of subgradient oracles have guaranteed convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note develops a distributed algorithm to solve a convex optimization problem with coupled constraints. Both coupled equality and inequality constraints are considered, where functions in the equality constraints are affine and functions in the inequality constraints are convex. Different from primal-dual subgradient methods with decreasing stepsizes for nonsmooth optimizations, our algorithm focuses on smooth problems and uses a fixed stepsize to find the exact optimal solution. Convergence analysis is derived with rigorous proofs. Our result is also illustrated by simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]