Title: Inertial block majorization minimization for solving multiblock composite optimization problems DuyNhat Phan Abstract: In this talk, we present inertial block Majorization Minimization (MM), a method for solving multiblock composite optimization problems with or without coupling linear constraints. The idea of MM is to iteratively minimize a surrogate function that locally approximates the objective function of the optimization problem. By using suitable surrogate functions, MM can recover well-known first-order algorithms such as the proximal point and proximal gradient. In our study, we investigate sub-sequential convergence as well as global convergence for the generated sequence of the method. We also demonstrate the acceleration effects of the inertial technique on two important machine learning problems, namely a matrix completion problem, and a nonconvex low-rank representation problem.