We study the iteration complexity of the optimistic gradient descent-ascent (OGDA) method and the extragradient (EG) method for finding a saddle point of a convex-concave unconstrained min-max problem. To do so, we first show that both OGDA and EG can be interpreted as approximate variants of the proximal point method. This is similar to the approach taken in (A. Nemirovski ( 2004), SIAM J. Optim., 15, pp. 229--251) which analyzes EG as an approximation of the `conceptual mirror prox."" In this paper, we highlight how gradients used in OGDA and EG try to approximate the gradient of the proximal point method. We then exploit this interpretation to show that both algorithms produce iterates that remain within a bounded set. We further show that the primal-dual gap of the averaged iterates generated by both of these algorithms converge with a rate of \scrO (1/k). Our theoretical analysis is of interest as it provides the first convergence rate estimate for OGDA in the general convex-concave setting. Moreover, it provides a simple convergence analysis for the EG algorithm in terms of function value without using a compactness assumption.

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Abstract-In this paper we consider energy efficient scheduling in a multiuser setting where each user has a finite sized queue and there is a cost associated with holding packets (jobs) in each queue (modeling the delay constraints). The packets of each user need to be sent over a common channel. The channel qualities seen by the users are time-varying and differ across users. Also, the cost incurred, i.e. energy consumed, in packet transmission is a function of the channel quality. We pose the problem as an average cost Markov Decision Problem and prove that this problem is Whittle Indexable. Based on this result we propose an algorithm in which the Whittle index of each user is computed and the user who has the lowest value is selected for transmission. We evaluate the performance of this algorithm via simulations and show that it achieves a lower average cost than the Maximum Weight Scheduling and Weighted Fair Scheduling strategies.

Viewing a two time scale stochastic approximation scheme as a noisy discretization of a singularly perturbed differential equation, we obtain a concentration bound for its iterates that captures its behavior with quantifiable high probability. This uses Alekseev's nonlinear variation of constants formula and a martingale concentration inequality, and extends the corresponding results for single time scale stochastic approximation.

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