A Laplacian Approach to $\ell_1$-Norm Minimization

We propose a novel differentiable reformulation of the linearly-constrained $\ell_1$ minimization problem, also known as the basis pursuit problem. The reformulation is inspired by the Laplacian paradigm of network theory and leads to a new family of gradient-based methods for the solution of $\ell_1$ minimization problems. We analyze the iteration complexity of a natural solution approach to the reformulation, based on a multiplicative weights update scheme, as well as the iteration complexity of an accelerated gradient scheme. The results can be seen as bounds on the complexity of iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) type methods of basis pursuit.