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We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of an average function of a large number of smooth convex components and a general, possibly non-differentiable, convex function. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem…
This paper considers general rank-constrained optimization problems that minimize a general objective function $f(X)$ over the set of rectangular $n\times m$ matrices that have rank at most $r$. To tackle the rank constraint and also to…
The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) were extensively investigated in the past decades for solving separable convex optimization problems. Fewer researchers focused on exploring its convergence properties for the nonconvex…
In this paper, we study a variant of the quadratic penalty method for linearly constrained convex problems, which has already been widely used but actually lacks theoretical justification. Namely, the penalty parameter steadily increases…
Online optimization has emerged as powerful tool in large scale optimization. In this paper, we introduce efficient online algorithms based on the alternating directions method (ADM). We introduce a new proof technique for ADM in the batch…
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…
We propose the convex factorization machine (CFM), which is a convex variant of the widely used Factorization Machines (FMs). Specifically, we employ a linear+quadratic model and regularize the linear term with the $\ell_2$-regularizer and…
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a key technique for feature extraction and widely used in source separation. However, existing algorithms may converge to poor local minima, or to one of several minima with similar objective value…
We propose a framework for online meta-optimization of parameters that govern optimization, called Amortized Proximal Optimization (APO). We first interpret various existing neural network optimizers as approximate stochastic proximal point…
We propose two new alternating direction methods to solve "fully" nonsmooth constrained convex problems. Our algorithms have the best known worst-case iteration-complexity guarantee under mild assumptions for both the objective residual and…
This thesis focuses on developing and analyzing accelerated and inexact first-order methods for solving or finding stationary points of various nonconvex composite optimization (NCO) problems. The main tools mainly come from variational and…
This paper considers the distributed optimization of a sum of locally observable, non-convex functions. The optimization is performed over a multi-agent networked system, and each local function depends only on a subset of the variables. An…
Most of the optimal guidance problems can be formulated as nonconvex optimization problems, which can be solved indirectly by relaxation, convexification, or linearization. Although these methods are guaranteed to converge to the global…
Low-rank representation (LRR) is an effective method for subspace clustering and has found wide applications in computer vision and machine learning. The existing LRR solver is based on the alternating direction method (ADM). It suffers…
We study distributed non-convex optimization on a time-varying multi-agent network. Each node has access to its own smooth local cost function, and the collective goal is to minimize the sum of these functions. We generalize the results…
Nonconvex optimization is central to modern machine learning, but the general framework of nonconvex optimization yields weak convergence guarantees that are too pessimistic compared to practice. On the other hand, while convexity enables…
We consider a class of structured, nonconvex, nonsmooth optimization problems under orthogonality constraints, where the objectives combine a smooth function, a nonsmooth concave function, and a nonsmooth weakly convex function. This class…
Low-rank matrix completion has achieved great success in many real-world data applications. A matrix factorization model that learns latent features is usually employed and, to improve prediction performance, the similarities between latent…
We propose a general theory for studying the \xl{landscape} of nonconvex \xl{optimization} with underlying symmetric structures \tz{for a class of machine learning problems (e.g., low-rank matrix factorization, phase retrieval, and deep…
Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is the problem of approximating a nonnegative matrix with the product of two low-rank nonnegative matrices and has been shown to be particularly useful in many applications, e.g., in text mining, image…