On projected alternating BB methods for variational inequalities

Abstract

The Barzilai–Borwein (BB) step size initially proposed in the context of unconstrained optimization has become one of the most popular step choices for gradient-based methods in the optimization community. It is well-known that the powerful variational inequality can be used to characterize the first-order optimality condition of constrained optimization problems. However, a variational inequality problem is not always equivalent to a constrained optimization problem. In this paper, we follow the spirit of BB step size and propose a projection method with alternate BB step size for general variational inequalities. Although the global convergence is established under some strong conditions, a series of computational experiments on nonlinear complementarity problems, image deblurring problems and generalized Nash equilibrium problems demonstrate that the proposed almost-parameter-free projection method is more efficient than some existing state-of-the-art projection methods in the literature.