Related papers: Open problem: Tightness of maximum likelihood semi…
In recent years, semidefinite relaxations of common optimization problems in robotics have attracted growing attention due to their ability to provide globally optimal solutions. In many cases, it was shown that specific handcrafted…
Estimating the leading principal components of data, assuming they are sparse, is a central task in modern high-dimensional statistics. Many algorithms were developed for this sparse PCA problem, from simple diagonal thresholding to…
Statistical inference problems arising within signal processing, data mining, and machine learning naturally give rise to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These problems become intractable when the dimensionality of the data is…
The vast majority of the literature on stochastic semidefinite programs (stochastic SDPs) with recourse is concerned with risk-neutral models. In this paper, we introduce mean-risk models for stochastic SDPs and study structural properties…
We consider optimization problems containing nonconvex quadratic functions for which semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations often yield strong bounds. We investigate linear inequalities that outer approximate the positive semidefinite…
In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing a general homogeneous quadratic function, subject to three real or four complex homogeneous quadratic inequality or equality constraints. For this problem, we present a sufficient and…
Robust Markov decision processes (RMDPs) extend standard Markov decision processes (MDPs) to account for uncertainty in the transition probabilities. RMDPs have an uncertainty set that defines a set of possible transition functions, each of…
We study exact recovery conditions for the linear programming relaxation of the k-median problem in the stochastic ball model (SBM). In Awasthi et al. (2015), the authors give a tight result for the k-median LP in the SBM, saying that exact…
For a large class of optimization problems, namely those that can be expressed as finite-valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs), we establish a dichotomy on the number of levels of the Lasserre hierarchy of semi-definite programs…
We study semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the NP-hard problem of globally optimizing a quadratic function over the Stiefel manifold. We introduce a strengthened relaxation based on two recent ideas in the literature: (i) a…
Structured prediction is used in areas such as computer vision and natural language processing to predict structured outputs such as segmentations or parse trees. In these settings, prediction is performed by MAP inference or, equivalently,…
This paper studies robust solutions and semidefinite linear programming (SDP) relaxations of a class of convex polynomial programs in the face of data uncertainty. The class of convex programs, called robust SOS-convex programs, includes…
We present a new generic approach to the condensed-matter ground-state problem which is complementary to variational techniques and works directly in the thermodynamic limit. Relaxing the ground-state problem, we obtain semidefinite…
Approximate linear programming (ALP) and its variants have been widely applied to Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with a large number of states. A serious limitation of ALP is that it has an intractable number of constraints, as a result…
Orthogonal group synchronization aims to recover orthogonal group elements from their noisy pairwise measurements. It has found numerous applications including computer vision, imaging science, and community detection. Due to the orthogonal…
Consider recovering a rank-one tensor of size $n_1 \times \cdots \times n_d$ from exact or noisy observations of a few of its entries. We tackle this problem via semidefinite programming (SDP). We derive deterministic combinatorial…
We study the sample complexity of obtaining an $\epsilon$-optimal policy in \emph{Robust} discounted Markov Decision Processes (RMDPs), given only access to a generative model of the nominal kernel. This problem is widely studied in the…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) problems are challenging to solve because of their high dimensionality. However, solving sparse SDP problems with small tree-width are known to be relatively easier because: (1) they can be decomposed into…
We consider the NP-hard problem of minimizing a convex quadratic function over the integer lattice ${\bf Z}^n$. We present a simple semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for obtaining a nontrivial lower bound on the optimal value of the…
This note proposes a new reformulation of complex semidefinite programs (SDPs) as real SDPs. As an application, we present an economical reformulation of complex SDP relaxations of complex polynomial optimization problems as real SDPs and…