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Lower bounds for conditional gradient type methods for minimizing smooth strongly convex functions

In this paper, we consider conditional gradient methods. These are methods that use a linear minimization oracle, which, for a given vector $p \in \mathbb{R}^n$, computes the solution of the subproblem $$\arg \min_{x\in X}{\langle p,x \rangle}.$$ There are a variety of conditional gradient methods that have a linear convergence rate in a strongly convex case. However, in all these methods, the dimension of the problem is included in the rate of convergence, which in modern applications can be very large. In this paper, we prove that in the strongly convex case, the convergence rate of the conditional gradient methods in the best case depends on the dimension of the problem $ n $ as $ \widetilde Ω (\sqrt {n}) $. Thus, the conditional gradient methods may turn out to be ineffective for solving strongly convex optimization problems of large dimensions. Also, the application of conditional gradient methods to minimization problems of a quadratic form is considered. The effectiveness of the Frank-Wolfe method for solving the quadratic optimization problem in the convex case on a simplex (PageRank) has already been proved. This work shows that the use of conditional gradient methods to solve the minimization problem of a quadratic form in a strongly convex case is ineffective due to the presence of dimension in the convergence rate of these methods. Therefore, the Shrinking Conditional Gradient method is considered. Its difference from the conditional gradient methods is that it uses a modified linear minimization oracle. The convergence rate of such an algorithm does not depend on dimension. Using the Shrinking Conditional Gradient method the complexity of solving the minimization problem of quadratic form on a $ \infty $-ball is obtained. The resulting evaluation of the method is comparable to the complexity of the gradient method.