Related papers: A Grothendieck-type inequality for local maxima
Semidefinite programs are an important class of convex optimization problems. It can be solved efficiently by SDP solvers in Matlab, such as SeDuMi, SDPT3, DSDP. However, since we are running fixed precision SDP solvers in Matlab, for some…
We develop tractable convex relaxations for rank-constrained quadratic optimization problems over $n \times m$ matrices, a setting for which tractable relaxations are typically only available when the objective or constraints admit spectral…
The economic dispatch problem is considered for unbalanced three-phase power distribution networks entailing both non-deferrable and elastic loads, and distributed generation (DG) units. The objective is to minimize the costs of power drawn…
An usual problem in statistics consists in estimating the minimizer of a convex function. When we have to deal with large samples taking values in high dimensional spaces, stochastic gradient algorithms and their averaged versions are…
We consider the semi-infinite system of polynomial inequalities of the form \[ \mathbf{K}:=\{x\in\mathbb{R}^m\mid p(x,y)\ge 0,\ \ \forall y\in S\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n\}, \] where $p(x,y)$ is a real polynomial in the variables $x$ and the…
Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…
This paper studies an optimization problem on the sum of traces of matrix quadratic forms in $m$ semi-orthogonal matrices, which can be considered as a generalization of the synchronization of rotations. While the problem is nonconvex, the…
This paper proposes a general fixture layout design framework that directly integrates the system equation with the convex relaxation method. Note that the optimal fixture design problem is a large-scale combinatorial optimization problem,…
Support vector machines (SVMs) are well-studied supervised learning models for binary classification. In many applications, large amounts of samples can be cheaply and easily obtained. What is often a costly and error-prone process is to…
In computer vision, many problems such as image segmentation, pixel labelling, and scene parsing can be formulated as binary quadratic programs (BQPs). For submodular problems, cuts based methods can be employed to efficiently solve…
The multireference alignment problem consists of estimating a signal from multiple noisy shifted observations. Inspired by existing Unique-Games approximation algorithms, we provide a semidefinite program (SDP) based relaxation which…
The worst-case robust adaptive beamforming problem for general-rank signal model is considered. Its formulation is to maximize the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR), incorporating a positive semidefinite constraint…
In solving hard computational problems, semidefinite program (SDP) relaxations often play an important role because they come with a guarantee of optimality. Here, we focus on a popular semidefinite relaxation of K-means clustering which…
We consider the classic problem of establishing a statistical ranking of a set of n items given a set of inconsistent and incomplete pairwise comparisons between such items. Instantiations of this problem occur in numerous applications in…
Random projection, a dimensionality reduction technique, has been found useful in recent years for reducing the size of optimization problems. In this paper, we explore the use of sparse sub-gaussian random projections to approximate…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
Correspondence problems are often modelled as quadratic optimization problems over permutations. Common scalable methods for approximating solutions of these NP-hard problems are the spectral relaxation for non-convex energies and the…
We study an extended trust region subproblem minimizing a nonconvex function over the hollow ball $r \le \|x\| \le R$ intersected with a full-dimensional second order cone (SOC) constraint of the form $\|x - c\| \le b^T x - a$. In…
In this paper, we propose a low-rank coordinate descent approach to structured semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints. The approach, which we call the Mixing method, is extremely simple to implement, has no free parameters, and…
Many high dimensional sparse learning problems are formulated as nonconvex optimization. A popular approach to solve these nonconvex optimization problems is through convex relaxations such as linear and semidefinite programming. In this…