  In this paper, we propose an interior-point method for linearly constrained
optimization problems (possibly nonconvex). The method - which we call the
Hessian barrier algorithm (HBA) - combines a forward Euler discretization of
Hessian Riemannian gradient flows with an Armijo backtracking step-size policy.
In this way, HBA can be seen as an alternative to mirror descent (MD), and
contains as special cases the affine scaling algorithm, regularized Newton
processes, and several other iterative solution methods. Our main result is
that, modulo a non-degeneracy condition, the algorithm converges to the
problem's set of critical points; hence, in the convex case, the algorithm
converges globally to the problem's minimum set. In the case of linearly
constrained quadratic programs (not necessarily convex), we also show that the
method's convergence rate is $\mathcal{O}(1/k^\rho)$ for some $\rho\in(0,1]$
that depends only on the choice of kernel function (i.e., not on the problem's
primitives). These theoretical results are validated by numerical experiments
in standard non-convex test functions and large-scale traffic assignment
problems.
