Accelerating SAV-based optimization via randomized low-rank Hessian approximation

Abstract

We propose a new optimization method, the Nyström-enhanced relaxed scalar auxiliary variable method (N-RSAV), which incorporates curvature information into the RSAV framework to accelerate convergence while preserving an unconditional modified energy dissipation law. Existing RSAV-based methods rely solely on first-order information and often suffer from slow convergence, particularly for ill-conditioned problems such as those arising in physics-informed neural networks (PINNs). To address this limitation, we design the linear operator in the RSAV scheme using approximate Hessian information obtained from a randomized low-rank Nyström approximation. To preserve the dissipation structure, we enforce positive semidefiniteness through eigenvalue truncation. Furthermore, we introduce an adaptive strategy that reuses the approximate Hessian based on the deviation between the original and modified energies, significantly reducing computational cost. We also provide a convergence analysis of the RSAV scheme with a general positive semidefinite operator under the Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) condition and establish corresponding convergence guarantees for N-RSAV under the PL condition and an additional convexity assumption. Numerical experiments on ill-conditioned problems with effectively low-rank structure, including convex quadratic problems and training of PINNs, demonstrate that the proposed methods achieve substantially faster convergence than conventional RSAV-based approaches.