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Convex nonsmooth optimization problems, whose solutions live in very high dimensional spaces, have become ubiquitous. To solve them, the class of first-order algorithms known as proximal splitting algorithms is particularly adequate: they…
Solving linear programs is often a challenging task in distributed settings. While there are good algorithms for solving packing and covering linear programs in a distributed manner (Kuhn et al.~2006), this is essentially the only class of…
In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…
This work concerns the global minimization of a prescribed eigenvalue or a weighted sum of prescribed eigenvalues of a Hermitian matrix-valued function depending on its parameters analytically in a box. We describe how the analytical…
Error bound analysis, which estimates the distance of a point to the solution set of an optimization problem using the optimality residual, is a powerful tool for the analysis of first-order optimization algorithms. In this paper, we use…
The talent scheduling problem is a simplified version of the real-world film shooting problem, which aims to determine a shooting sequence so as to minimize the total cost of the actors involved. In this article, we first formulate the…
Mini-batch algorithms have been proposed as a way to speed-up stochastic convex optimization problems. We study how such algorithms can be improved using accelerated gradient methods. We provide a novel analysis, which shows how standard…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Approximating a function with a finite series, e.g., involving polynomials or trigonometric functions, is a critical tool in computing and data analysis. The construction of such approximations via now-standard approaches like least squares…
This paper focuses on the distributed optimization of stochastic saddle point problems. The first part of the paper is devoted to lower bounds for the centralized and decentralized distributed methods for smooth (strongly) convex-(strongly)…
Weight optimization of frame structures with continuous cross-section parametrization is a challenging non-convex problem that has traditionally been solved by local optimization techniques. Here, we exploit its inherent semi-algebraic…
In this paper we consider large-scale smooth optimization problems with multiple linear coupled constraints. Due to the non-separability of the constraints, arbitrary random sketching would not be guaranteed to work. Thus, we first…
This paper considers global optimization with a black-box unknown objective function that can be non-convex and non-differentiable. Such a difficult optimization problem arises in many real-world applications, such as parameter tuning in…
Optimization problems under affine constraints appear in various areas of machine learning. We consider the task of minimizing a smooth strongly convex function F(x) under the affine constraint Kx=b, with an oracle providing evaluations of…
This paper presents a practical global optimization algorithm for the K-center clustering problem, which aims to select K samples as the cluster centers to minimize the maximum within-cluster distance. This algorithm is based on a…
The graduated optimization approach, also known as the continuation method, is a popular heuristic to solving non-convex problems that has received renewed interest over the last decade. Despite its popularity, very little is known in terms…
A lot of problems, from fields like sparse signal processing, statistics, portfolio selection, and machine learning, can be formulated as a cardinality constraint optimization problem. The cardinality constraint gives the problem a discrete…
We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…
In this paper, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent algorithm for large-scale nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. At each iteration, a particular block variable is selected and updated by inexactly solving the original…
We propose a general scheme for solving convex and non-convex optimization problems on manifolds. The central idea is that, by adding a multiple of the squared retraction distance to the objective function in question, we "convexify" the…