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We consider Riemannian inequality-constrained optimization problems. Such problems inherit the benefits of Riemannian approach developed in the unconstrained setting and naturally arise from applications in control, machine learning, and…
In many applications, we are given access to noisy modulo samples of a smooth function with the goal being to robustly unwrap the samples, i.e., to estimate the original samples of the function. In a recent work, Cucuringu and Tyagi…
In this note, we present a derivative-free trust-region (TR) algorithm for reliability based optimization (RBO) problems. The proposed algorithm consists of solving a set of subproblems, in which simple surrogate models of the reliability…
The paper addresses the problem of low-rank trace norm minimization. We propose an algorithm that alternates between fixed-rank optimization and rank-one updates. The fixed-rank optimization is characterized by an efficient factorization…
This paper considers robust solutions to a class of nonlinear least squares problems using min-max optimization approach. We give an explicit formula for the value function of the inner maximization problem and show the existence of global…
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is ubiquitous in machine learning and underlies most supervised learning methods. While there has been a large body of work on algorithms for various ERM problems, the exact computational complexity of ERM…
Trace norm regularization is a widely used approach for learning low rank matrices. A standard optimization strategy is based on formulating the problem as one of low rank matrix factorization which, however, leads to a non-convex problem.…
Many large-scale optimization problems arising in science and engineering are naturally defined at multiple levels of discretization or model fidelity. Multilevel methods exploit this hierarchy to accelerate convergence by combining coarse-…
Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an important paradigm for unlocking reasoning capabilities in large language models, exemplified by the success of OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Currently, Group Relative…
We propose a Binary Robust Least Squares (BRLS) model that encompasses key robust least squares formulations, such as those involving uncertain binary labels and adversarial noise constrained within a hypercube. We show that the geometric…
Many computer vision problems require optimization of binary non-submodular energies. We propose a general optimization framework based on local submodular approximations (LSA). Unlike standard LP relaxation methods that linearize the whole…
The TREX is a recently introduced method for performing sparse high-dimensional regression. Despite its statistical promise as an alternative to the lasso, square-root lasso, and scaled lasso, the TREX is computationally challenging in that…
We study the convergence of a variant of distributed gradient descent (DGD) on a distributed low-rank matrix approximation problem wherein some optimization variables are used for consensus (as in classical DGD) and some optimization…
In this paper we consider three minimization problems, namely quadratic, $\rho$-convex and quadratic fractional programing problems. The quadratic problem is considered with quadratic inequality constraints with bounded continuous and…
This article introduces an algorithm for implicit High Dimensional Model Representation (HDMR) of the Bellman equation. This approximation technique reduces memory demands of the algorithm considerably. Moreover, we show that HDMR enables…
Extracting a small subset of representative tuples from a large database is an important task in multi-criteria decision making. The regret-minimizing set (RMS) problem is recently proposed for representative discovery from databases.…
In this paper, we study the generalization performance of global minima for implementing empirical risk minimization (ERM) on over-parameterized deep ReLU nets. Using a novel deepening scheme for deep ReLU nets, we rigorously prove that…
This note uses the Total Least-Squares (TLS) line-fitting problem as a canvas to explore some modern optimization tools. The contribution is meant to be tutorial in nature. The TLS problem has a lot of mathematical similarities to important…
Policy gradient methods for Large Language Models optimize a policy $\pi_\theta$ via a surrogate objective computed from samples of a rollout policy $\pi_{\text{roll}}$. However, modern LLM-RL pipelines suffer from unavoidable…
Many recent problems in signal processing and machine learning such as compressed sensing, image restoration, matrix/tensor recovery, and non-negative matrix factorization can be cast as constrained optimization. Projected gradient descent…