Related papers: Fast Algorithms for Robust PCA via Gradient Descen…

Sparse principal component analysis (PCA) involves nonconvex optimization for which the global solution is hard to obtain. To address this issue, one popular approach is convex relaxation. However, such an approach may produce suboptimal…

We study a data model in which the data matrix D can be expressed as D = L + S + C, where L is a low rank matrix, S an element-wise sparse matrix and C a matrix whose non-zero columns are outlying data points. To date, robust PCA algorithms…

Given a known matrix that is the sum of a low rank matrix and a masked sparse matrix, we wish to recover both the low rank component and the sparse component. The sparse matrix is masked in the sense that a linear transformation has been…

In this two-part paper, we propose a general algorithmic framework for the minimization of a nonconvex smooth function subject to nonconvex smooth constraints. The algorithm solves a sequence of (separable) strongly convex problems and…

Low-rank tensor completion problem aims to recover a tensor from limited observations, which has many real-world applications. Due to the easy optimization, the convex overlapping nuclear norm has been popularly used for tensor completion.…

We study how well one can recover sparse principal components of a data matrix using a sketch formed from a few of its elements. We show that for a wide class of optimization problems, if the sketch is close (in the spectral norm) to the…

This paper considers the robust phase retrieval problem, which can be cast as a nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problem. We propose a new inexact proximal linear algorithm with the subproblem being solved inexactly. Our contributions…

Rapid advances in data collection and processing capabilities have allowed for the use of increasingly complex models that give rise to nonconvex optimization problems. These formulations, however, can be arbitrarily difficult to solve in…

We propose a stochastic variance reduced optimization algorithm for solving sparse learning problems with cardinality constraints. Sufficient conditions are provided, under which the proposed algorithm enjoys strong linear convergence…

The difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) is a well-established nonlinear programming technique that solves successive convex optimization problems. These sub-problems are obtained from the difference-of-convex~(DC) decompositions of the…

Matrix completion has attracted much interest in the past decade in machine learning and computer vision. For low-rank promotion in matrix completion, the nuclear norm penalty is convenient due to its convexity but has a bias problem.…

This work studies low-rank approximation of a positive semidefinite matrix from partial entries via nonconvex optimization. We characterized how well local-minimum based low-rank factorization approximates a fixed positive semidefinite…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) is a widely-used approach to learn models that are robust against distribution shift. Compared with the standard optimization setting, the objective function in DRO is more difficult to optimize,…

Robust optimization (RO) is a powerful paradigm for decision making under uncertainty. Existing algorithms for solving RO, including the reformulation approach and the cutting-plane method, do not scale well, hindering the application of RO…

In this paper, we study zeroth-order algorithms for minimax optimization problems that are nonconvex in one variable and strongly-concave in the other variable. Such minimax optimization problems have attracted significant attention lately…

Minimizing a convex function of a measure with a sparsity-inducing penalty is a typical problem arising, e.g., in sparse spikes deconvolution or two-layer neural networks training. We show that this problem can be solved by discretizing the…

In this paper, we investigate optimization problems with nonnegative and orthogonal constraints, where any feasible matrix of size $n \times p$ exhibits a sparsity pattern such that each row accommodates at most one nonzero entry. Our…

Despite the recent development in machine learning, most learning systems are still under the concept of "black box", where the performance cannot be understood and derived. With the rise of safety and privacy concerns in public, designing…

The paper considers the minimization of a separable convex function subject to linear ascending constraints. The problem arises as the core optimization in several resource allocation scenarios, and is a special case of an optimization of a…

A strategy is proposed for characterizing the worst-case performance of algorithms for solving nonconvex smooth optimization problems. Contemporary analyses characterize worst-case performance by providing, under certain assumptions on an…