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Matrix completion is a basic machine learning problem that has wide applications, especially in collaborative filtering and recommender systems. Simple non-convex optimization algorithms are popular and effective in practice. Despite recent…
This paper presents a comprehensive exploration of semi-definite programming (SDP) techniques within the context of quantum information. It examines the mathematical foundations of convex optimization, duality, and SDP formulations,…
Decentralized optimization strategies are helpful for various applications, from networked estimation to distributed machine learning. This paper studies finite-sum minimization problems described over a network of nodes and proposes a…
We study the problem of decomposing a polynomial $p$ into a sum of $r$ squares by minimizing a quadratically penalized objective $f_p(\mathbf{u}) = \left\lVert \sum_{i=1}^r u_i^2 - p\right\lVert^2$. This objective is nonconvex and is…
This paper studies robust solutions and semidefinite linear programming (SDP) relaxations of a class of convex polynomial programs in the face of data uncertainty. The class of convex programs, called robust SOS-convex programs, includes…
Montanari and Richard (2015) asked whether a natural semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation can effectively optimize $\mathbf{x}^{\top}\mathbf{W} \mathbf{x}$ over $\|\mathbf{x}\| = 1$ with $x_i \geq 0$ for all coordinates $i$, where…
The semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation has proven to be extremely strong for many hard discrete optimization problems. This is in particular true for the quadratic assignment problem (QAP), arguably one of the hardest NP-hard…
We propose two novel conditional gradient-based methods for solving structured stochastic convex optimization problems with a large number of linear constraints. Instances of this template naturally arise from SDP-relaxations of…
The low-rank stochastic semidefinite optimization has attracted rising attention due to its wide range of applications. The nonconvex reformulation based on the low-rank factorization, significantly improves the computational efficiency but…
We investigate a class of general combinatorial graph problems, including MAX-CUT and community detection, reformulated as quadratic objectives over nonconvex constraints and solved via the alternating direction method of multipliers…
Despite the numerous uses of semidefinite programming (SDP) and its universal solvability via interior point methods (IPMs), it is rarely applied to practical large-scale problems. This mainly owes to the computational cost of IPMs that…
Fast power system state estimation (SE) solution is of paramount importance for achieving real-time decision making in power grid operations. Semidefinite programming (SDP) reformulation has been shown effective to obtain the global optimum…
We consider semidefinite programming (SDP) approaches for solving the maximum satisfiability problem (MAX-SAT) and the weighted partial MAX-SAT. It is widely known that SDP is well-suited to approximate the (MAX-)2-SAT. Our work shows the…
Submodular function minimization is a fundamental optimization problem that arises in several applications in machine learning and computer vision. The problem is known to be solvable in polynomial time, but general purpose algorithms have…
The canonical duality theory has provided with a unified analytic solution to a range of discrete and continuous problems in global optimization, which can transform a nonconvex primal problem to a concave maximization dual problem over a…
The spectral bundle method proposed by Helmberg and Rendl is well established for solving large-scale semidefinite programs (SDP) thanks to its low per iteration computational complexity and strong practical performance. In this paper, we…
We study differentially private (DP) algorithms for stochastic convex optimization: the problem of minimizing the population loss given i.i.d. samples from a distribution over convex loss functions. A recent work of Bassily et al. (2019)…
We give two quantum algorithms for solving semidefinite programs (SDPs) providing quantum speed-ups. We consider SDP instances with $m$ constraint matrices, each of dimension $n$, rank at most $r$, and sparsity $s$. The first algorithm…
We consider the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem for succinct Markov decision processes (MDPs), where the MDP consists of a set of variables, and a set of nondeterministic rules that update the variables. First, we show that several…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are a particular class of convex optimization problems with applications in combinatorial optimization, operational research, and quantum information science. Seminal work by Brand\~{a}o and Svore shows that a…