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Recent several years have witnessed the surge of asynchronous (async-) parallel computing methods due to the extremely big data involved in many modern applications and also the advancement of multi-core machines and computer clusters. In optimization, most works about async-parallel methods are on unconstrained problems or those with block separable constraints. In this paper, we propose an async-parallel method based on block coordinate update (BCU) for solving convex problems with <i>nonseparable</i> linear constraint. Running on a single node, the method becomes a novel randomized primaldual BCU for multi-block affinely constrained problems. For these problems, GaussSeidel cyclic primaldual BCU is not guaranteed to converge to an optimal solution if no additional assumptions, such as strong convexity, are made. On the contrary, assuming convexity and existence of a primaldual

This paper focuses on coordinate update methods, which are useful for solving problems involving large or high-dimensional datasets. They decompose a problem into simple subproblems, where each updates one, or a small block of, variables while fixing others. These methods can deal with linear and nonlinear mappings, smooth and nonsmooth functions, as well as convex and nonconvex problems. In addition, they are easy to parallelize.

The support vector machine (SVM) has been used in a wide variety of classification problems. The original SVM uses the hinge loss function, which is non-differentiable and makes the problem difficult to solve in particular for regularized SVMs, such as with 1 -regularization. This paper considers the Huberized SVM (HSVM), which uses a differentiable approximation of the hinge loss function. We first explore the use of the proximal gradient (PG) method to solving binary-class HSVM (B-HSVM) and then generalize it to multi-class HSVM (M-HSVM). Under strong convexity assumptions, we show that our algorithm converges linearly. In addition, we give a finite convergence result about the support of the solution, based on which we further accelerate the algorithm by a two-stage method. We present extensive numerical experiments on both synthetic and real datasets which demonstrate the superiority of our

We discuss a variant of the multi-task <i>n</i>-vehicle exploration problem. Instead of requiring an optimal permutation of vehicles in every group, the new problem requires all vehicles in a group to arrive at the same destination. Given <i>n</i> tasks with assigned consume-time and profit, it may also be viewed as a maximization of every processors average profit. Further, we propose a new kind of partition problem in fractional form and analyze its computational complexity. By regarding fractional partition as a special case, we prove that the average profit maximization problem is NP-hard when the number of processors is fixed and it is strongly NPhard in general. At last, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for the average profit maximization problem and the fractional partition problem is presented, using the idea of the pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for the classical partition problem.