In this paper, we propose a Dai–Liao (DL) conjugate gradient method for solving large-scale system of nonlinear equations. The method incorporates an extended secant equation developed from modified secant equations proposed by Zhang et al. (J Optim Theory Appl 102(1):147–157, 1999 ) and Wei et al. (Appl Math Comput 175(2):1156–1188, 2006 ) in the DL approach. It is shown that the proposed scheme satisfies the sufficient descent condition. The global convergence of the method is established under mild conditions, and computational experiments on some benchmark test problems show that the method is efficient and robust.

In this paper, we present a brief survey of methods for solving nonlinear least-squares problems. We pay specific attention to methods that take into account the special structure of the problems. Most of the methods discussed belong to the quasi-Newton family (i.e. the structured quasi-Newton methods (SQN)). Our survey comprises some of the traditional and modern developed methods for nonlinear least-squares problems. At the end, we suggest a few topics for further research.