Related papers: Global Optimality in Low-rank Matrix Optimization
We study the asymmetric low-rank factorization problem: \[\min_{\mathbf{U} \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times d}, \mathbf{V} \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}} \frac{1}{2}\|\mathbf{U}\mathbf{V}^\top -\mathbf{\Sigma}\|_F^2\] where $\mathbf{\Sigma}$ is a…
We consider the problem of approximating an affinely structured matrix, for example a Hankel matrix, by a low-rank matrix with the same structure. This problem occurs in system identification, signal processing and computer algebra, among…
We introduce a geometrically transparent strict saddle property for nonsmooth functions. This property guarantees that simple proximal algorithms on weakly convex problems converge only to local minimizers, when randomly initialized. We…
The proliferation of saddle points, rather than poor local minima, is increasingly understood to be a primary obstacle in large-scale non-convex optimization for machine learning. Variable elimination algorithms, like Variable Projection…
In this paper, we propose a general class of algorithms for optimizing an extensive variety of nonsmoothly penalized objective functions that satisfy certain regularity conditions. The proposed framework utilizes the…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) on a low-rank factorization is commonly employed to speed up matrix problems including matrix completion, subspace tracking, and SDP relaxation. In this paper, we exhibit a step size scheme for SGD on a…
This paper studies first order methods for solving smooth minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y g(x,y)$ where $g(\cdot,\cdot)$ is smooth and $g(x,\cdot)$ is concave for each $x$. In terms of $g(\cdot,y)$, we consider two settings --…
Numerous applications require algorithms that can align partially overlapping point sets while maintaining invariance to geometric transformations (e.g., similarity, affine, rigid). This paper introduces a novel global optimization method…
Symmetric nonnegative matrix factorization has found abundant applications in various domains by providing a symmetric low-rank decomposition of nonnegative matrices. In this paper we propose a Frank-Wolfe (FW) solver to optimize the…
Global optimization problems whose objective function is expensive to evaluate can be solved effectively by recursively fitting a surrogate function to function samples and minimizing an acquisition function to generate new samples. The…
The goal of affine matrix rank minimization problem is to reconstruct a low-rank or approximately low-rank matrix under linear constraints. In general, this problem is combinatorial and NP-hard. In this paper, a nonconvex fraction function…
We revisit the smooth convex-concave bilinearly-coupled saddle-point problem of the form $\min_x\max_y f(x) + \langle y,\mathbf{B} x\rangle - g(y)$. In the highly specific case where each of the functions $f(x)$ and $g(y)$ is either affine…
In the article we present a general theory of augmented Lagrangian functions for cone constrained optimization problems that allows one to study almost all known augmented Lagrangians for cone constrained programs within a unified…
In this paper, the problem of matrix rank minimization under affine constraints is addressed. The state-of-the-art algorithms can recover matrices with a rank much less than what is sufficient for the uniqueness of the solution of this…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
The matrix completion problem consists of finding or approximating a low-rank matrix based on a few samples of this matrix. We propose a new algorithm for matrix completion that minimizes the least-square distance on the sampling set over…
We study implicit regularization when optimizing an underdetermined quadratic objective over a matrix $X$ with gradient descent on a factorization of $X$. We conjecture and provide empirical and theoretical evidence that with small enough…
For the general problem of minimizing a convex function over a compact convex domain, we will investigate a simple iterative approximation algorithm based on the method by Frank & Wolfe 1956, that does not need projection steps in order to…
Machine learning algorithms typically perform optimization over a class of non-convex functions. In this work, we provide bounds on the fundamental hardness of identifying the global minimizer of a non convex function. Specifically, we…
We explore the local landscape of low-rank matrix recovery, focusing on reconstructing a $d_1\times d_2$ matrix $X^\star$ with rank $r$ from $m$ linear measurements, some potentially noisy. When the noise is distributed according to an…