Spingarn's Method and Progressive Decoupling Beyond Elicitable Monotonicity

Spingarn's method of partial inverses and the progressive decoupling algorithm address inclusion problems involving the sum of an operator and the normal cone of a linear subspace, known as linkage problems. Despite their success, existing convergence results are limited to the so-called elicitable monotone setting, where nonmonotonicity is allowed only on the orthogonal complement of the linkage subspace. In this paper, we introduce progressive decoupling+, a generalized version of standard progressive decoupling that incorporates separate relaxation parameters for the linkage subspace and its orthogonal complement. We prove convergence under conditions that link the relaxation parameters to the nonmonotonicity of their respective subspaces and show that the special cases of Spingarn's method and standard progressive decoupling also extend beyond the elicitable monotone setting. Our analysis hinges upon an equivalence between progressive decoupling+ and the preconditioned proximal point algorithm, for which we develop a general local convergence analysis in a certain nonmonotone setting.

@article{evens2025_2504.00836,
  title={ Spingarn's Method and Progressive Decoupling Beyond Elicitable Monotonicity },
  author={ Brecht Evens and Puya Latafat and Panagiotis Patrinos },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.00836},
  year={ 2025 }
}