Related papers: Open problem: Tightness of maximum likelihood semi…
This paper develops new semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation techniques for two classes of mixed binary quadratically constrained quadratic programs (MBQCQP) and analyzes their approximation performance. The first class of problem…
We address the problem of computing reliable policies in reinforcement learning problems with limited data. In particular, we compute policies that achieve good returns with high confidence when deployed. This objective, known as the…
The maximum softmax probability (MSP) represents a default approach when evaluating uncertainty quantification for language model generation with structured output. Although cheap, it is often miscalibrated. Methods that probe the model's…
While semidefinite programming (SDP) problems are polynomially solvable in theory, it is often difficult to solve large SDP instances in practice. One technique to address this issue is to relax the global positive-semidefiniteness (PSD)…
Theoretical guarantees are established for a standard estimator in a semi-parametric finite mixture model, where each component density is modeled as a product of univariate densities under a conditional independence assumption. The focus…
We investigate exact semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the problem of minimizing a nonconvex quadratic objective function over a feasible region defined by both finitely and infinitely many nonconvex quadratic inequality…
We give answer to an open problem regarding consistency of the maximum likelihood estimators (MLEs) in generalized linear mixed models (GLMMs) involving crossed random effects. The solution to the open problem introduces an interesting,…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) -- some of the most useful and versatile optimization problems of the last few decades -- are often pathological: the optimal values of the primal and dual problems may differ and may not be attained. Such SDPs…
The rotation search problem aims to find a 3D rotation that best aligns a given number of point pairs. To induce robustness against outliers for rotation search, prior work considers truncated least-squares (TLS), which is a non-convex…
Estimating a constrained relation is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Special cases are classification (the problem of estimating a map from a set of to-be-classified elements to a set of labels), clustering (the problem of…
Robust MDPs (RMDPs) can be used to compute policies with provable worst-case guarantees in reinforcement learning. The quality and robustness of an RMDP solution are determined by the ambiguity set---the set of plausible transition…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are a framework for exact or approximate optimization that have widespread application in quantum information theory. We introduce a new method for using reductions to construct integrality gaps for SDPs. These…
Montanari and Richard (2015) asked whether a natural semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation can effectively optimize $\mathbf{x}^{\top}\mathbf{W} \mathbf{x}$ over $\|\mathbf{x}\| = 1$ with $x_i \geq 0$ for all coordinates $i$, where…
In this paper, "chance optimization" problems are introduced, where one aims at maximizing the probability of a set defined by polynomial inequalities. These problems are, in general, nonconvex and computationally hard. With the objective…
We give the first approximation algorithm for mixed packing and covering semidefinite programs (SDPs) with polylogarithmic dependence on width. Mixed packing and covering SDPs constitute a fundamental algorithmic primitive with recent…
This paper studies how to solve semi-infinite polynomial programming (SIPP) problems by semidefinite relaxation method. We first introduce two SDP relaxation methods for solving polynomial optimization problems with finitely many…
Recently, there has been significant interest in convex relaxations of the optimal power flow (OPF) problem. A semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation globally solves many OPF problems. However, there exist practical problems for which…
This thesis explores algorithmic applications and limitations of convex relaxation hierarchies for approximating some discrete and continuous optimization problems. - We show a dichotomy of approximability of constraint satisfaction…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation has emerged as a promising approach for neural network verification, offering tighter bounds than other convex relaxation methods for deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activations. However, we…
Motivated by a certain molecular reconstruction methodology in cryo-electron microscopy, we consider the problem of solving a linear system with two unknown orthogonal matrices, which is a generalization of the well-known orthogonal…