Related papers: Relaxed Majorization-Minimization for Non-smooth a…
Optimization problems with composite functions consist of an objective function which is the sum of a smooth and a (convex) nonsmooth term. This particular structure is exploited by the class of proximal gradient methods and some of their…
We study the problem of finding approximate first-order stationary points in optimization problems of the form $\min_{x \in X} \max_{y \in Y} f(x,y)$, where the sets $X,Y$ are convex and $Y$ is compact. The objective function $f$ is smooth,…
Iterative majorize-minimize (MM) (also called optimization transfer) algorithms solve challenging numerical optimization problems by solving a series of "easier" optimization problems that are constructed to guarantee monotonic descent of…
Stochastic gradient descent type methods are ubiquitous in machine learning, but they are only applicable to the optimization of differentiable functions. Proximal algorithms are more general and applicable to nonsmooth functions. We…
Matrix factorization is a popular approach for large-scale matrix completion. The optimization formulation based on matrix factorization can be solved very efficiently by standard algorithms in practice. However, due to the non-convexity…
In this paper, we propose a multilevel stochastic framework for the solution of nonconvex unconstrained optimization problems. The proposed approach uses random regularized first-order models that exploit an available hierarchical…
We present a framework for smooth optimization of explicitly regularized objectives for (structured) sparsity. These non-smooth and possibly non-convex problems typically rely on solvers tailored to specific models and regularizers. In…
This monograph presents a theoretical background and a broad introduction to the Min-Max Framework for Majorization-Minimization (MM4MM), an algorithmic methodology for solving minimization problems by formulating them as min-max problems…
The principle of majorization-minimization (MM) provides a general framework for eliciting effective algorithms to solve optimization problems. However, they often suffer from slow convergence, especially in large-scale and high-dimensional…
Composite function minimization captures a wide spectrum of applications in both computer vision and machine learning. It includes bound constrained optimization and cardinality regularized optimization as special cases. This paper proposes…
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…
In this paper, we study optimization methods consisting of iteratively minimizing surrogates of an objective function. By proposing several algorithmic variants and simple convergence analyses, we make two main contributions. First, we…
Recently, convex formulations of low-rank matrix factorization problems have received considerable attention in machine learning. However, such formulations often require solving for a matrix of the size of the data matrix, making it…
Optimization over low rank matrices has broad applications in machine learning. For large scale problems, an attractive heuristic is to factorize the low rank matrix to a product of two much smaller matrices. In this paper, we study the…
We introduce a new algorithm for complex image reconstruction with separate regularization of the image magnitude and phase. This optimization problem is interesting in many different image reconstruction contexts, although is nonconvex and…
In this paper, we consider the minimization of a nonsmooth nonconvex objective function $f(x)$ over a closed convex subset $\mathcal{X}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, with additional nonsmooth nonconvex constraints $c(x) = 0$. We develop a unified…
The EM algorithm is a special case of a more general algorithm called the MM algorithm. Specific MM algorithms often have nothing to do with missing data. The first M step of an MM algorithm creates a surrogate function that is optimized in…
In this paper, we consider a class of structured nonsmooth fractional minimization, where the first part of the objective is the ratio of a nonnegative nonsmooth nonconvex function to a nonnegative nonsmooth convex function, while the…
In this paper, the problem of matrix rank minimization under affine constraints is addressed. The state-of-the-art algorithms can recover matrices with a rank much less than what is sufficient for the uniqueness of the solution of this…
We study the non-smooth optimization problems in machine learning, where both the loss function and the regularizer are non-smooth functions. Previous studies on efficient empirical loss minimization assume either a smooth loss function or…