Related papers: Solving SDPs for synchronization and MaxCut proble…
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…
We consider MaxCut-type semidefinite programs (SDP) which admit a low rank solution. To numerically leverage the low rank hypothesis, a standard algorithmic approach is the Burer-Monteiro factorization, which allows to significantly reduce…
Semidefinite programs (SDP) are important in learning and combinatorial optimization with numerous applications. In pursuit of low-rank solutions and low complexity algorithms, we consider the Burer--Monteiro factorization approach for…
We revisit the use of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for solving convex optimization problems that serve as highly popular convex relaxations for many important low-rank matrix recovery problems such as \textit{matrix completion},…
We introduce a generic technique to obtain linear relaxations of semidefinite programs with provable guarantees based on the commutativity of the constraint and the objective matrices. We study conditions under which the optimal value of…
We show that convex-concave Lipschitz stochastic saddle point problems (also known as stochastic minimax optimization) can be solved under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy with \emph{strong (primal-dual) gap} rate…
A very popular approach for solving stochastic optimization problems is the stochastic gradient descent method (SGD). Although the SGD iteration is computationally cheap and the practical performance of this method may be satisfactory under…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
In this paper, we consider nonconvex minimax optimization, which is gaining prominence in many modern machine learning applications such as GANs. Large-scale edge-based collection of training data in these applications calls for…
This paper presents exact Semi-Definite Program (SDP) reformulations for infinite-dimensional moment optimization problems involving a new class of piecewise Sum-of-Squares (SOS)-convex functions and projected spectrahedral support sets.…
This work is on constrained large-scale non-convex optimization where the constraint set implies a manifold structure. Solving such problems is important in a multitude of fundamental machine learning tasks. Recent advances on Riemannian…
In this work, we conduct a systematic study of stochastic saddle point problems (SSP) and stochastic variational inequalities (SVI) under the constraint of $(\epsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy (DP) in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean…
This paper focuses on the distributed optimization of stochastic saddle point problems. The first part of the paper is devoted to lower bounds for the centralized and decentralized distributed methods for smooth (strongly) convex-(strongly)…
In this paper, we study a number of well-known combinatorial optimization problems that fit in the following paradigm: the input is a collection of (potentially inconsistent) local relationships between the elements of a ground set (e.g.,…
We consider semidefinite programming (SDP) for the binary stochastic block model with equal-sized communities. Prior work of Hajek, Wu, and Xu proposed an SDP (sym-SDP) for the symmetric case where the intra-community edge probabilities are…
Although neural networks have been applied to several systems in recent years, they still cannot be used in safety-critical systems due to the lack of efficient techniques to certify their robustness. A number of techniques based on convex…
From optimal transport to robust dimensionality reduction, a plethora of machine learning applications can be cast into the min-max optimization problems over Riemannian manifolds. Though many min-max algorithms have been analyzed in the…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful framework from convex optimization that has striking potential for data science applications. This paper develops a provably correct randomized algorithm for solving large, weakly constrained SDP…
We consider the NP-hard problem of minimizing a convex quadratic function over the integer lattice ${\bf Z}^n$. We present a simple semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for obtaining a nontrivial lower bound on the optimal value of the…
The little Grothendieck problem consists of maximizing $\sum_{ij}C_{ij}x_ix_j$ over binary variables $x_i\in\{\pm1\}$, where C is a positive semidefinite matrix. In this paper we focus on a natural generalization of this problem, the little…