Related papers: Matrix Completion has No Spurious Local Minimum
We consider the problem of noisy 1-bit matrix completion under an exact rank constraint on the true underlying matrix $M^*$. Instead of observing a subset of the noisy continuous-valued entries of a matrix $M^*$, we observe a subset of…
Composite optimization problems involve minimizing the composition of a smooth map with a convex function. Such objectives arise in numerous data science and signal processing applications, including phase retrieval, blind deconvolution,…
In this paper, we study the popularly dubbed matrix completion problem, where the task is to "fill in" the unobserved entries of a matrix from a small subset of observed entries, under the assumption that the underlying matrix is of…
We consider the problem of minimizing a linear function over an affine section of the cone of positive semidefinite matrices, with the additional constraint that the feasible matrix has prescribed rank. When the rank constraint is active,…
The problem of approximating a dense matrix by a product of sparse factors is a fundamental problem for many signal processing and machine learning tasks. It can be decomposed into two subproblems: finding the position of the non-zero…
Finding multiple solutions of non-convex optimization problems is a ubiquitous yet challenging task. Most past algorithms either apply single-solution optimization methods from multiple random initial guesses or search in the vicinity of…
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…
The nonconvex formulation of the matrix completion problem has received significant attention in recent years due to its affordable complexity compared to the convex formulation. Gradient Descent (GD) is a simple yet efficient baseline…
We initiate the study of nonsmooth optimization problems under bounded local subgradient variation, which postulates bounded difference between (sub)gradients in small local regions around points, in either average or maximum sense. The…
Aligning partially overlapping point sets where there is no prior information about the value of the transformation is a challenging problem in computer vision. To achieve this goal, we first reduce the objective of the robust point…
We consider the unconstrained optimization problem whose objective function is composed of a smooth and a non-smooth conponents where the smooth component is the expectation a random function. This type of problem arises in some interesting…
This paper deals with the problem of robust matrix completion -- retrieving a low-rank matrix and a sparse matrix from the compressed counterpart of their superposition. Though seemingly not an unresolved issue, we point out that the…
Submodular function minimization is well studied, and existing algorithms solve it exactly or up to arbitrary accuracy. However, in many applications, such as structured sparse learning or batch Bayesian optimization, the objective function…
We consider structured minimization problems subject to smooth inequality constraints and present a flexible algorithm that combines interior point (IP) and proximal gradient schemes. While traditional IP methods cannot cope with nonsmooth…
We consider the problem of recovering low-rank matrices from random rank-one measurements, which spans numerous applications including covariance sketching, phase retrieval, quantum state tomography, and learning shallow polynomial neural…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in machine learning. Majorization-Minimization (MM) is a powerful iterative procedure for optimizing non-convex functions that works by optimizing a sequence of bounds on the function. In MM, the bound…
There is a recent surge of interest in nonconvex reformulations via low-rank factorization for stochastic convex semidefinite optimization problem in the purpose of efficiency and scalability. Compared with the original convex formulations,…
Generalized and Simulated Method of Moments are often used to estimate structural Economic models. Yet, it is commonly reported that optimization is challenging because the corresponding objective function is non-convex. For smooth…
A practical challenge for structural estimation is the requirement to accurately minimize a sample objective function which is often non-smooth, non-convex, or both. This paper proposes a simple algorithm designed to find accurate solutions…
This paper focuses on stochastic proximal gradient methods for optimizing a smooth non-convex loss function with a non-smooth non-convex regularizer and convex constraints. To the best of our knowledge we present the first non-asymptotic…