Related papers: Solving SDPs for synchronization and MaxCut proble…
We study the performance of stochastic first-order methods for finding saddle points of convex-concave functions. A notorious challenge faced by such methods is that the gradients can grow arbitrarily large during optimization, which may…
The Trust Region Subproblem is a fundamental optimization problem that takes a pivotal role in Trust Region Methods. However, the problem, and variants of it, also arise in quite a few other applications. In this article, we present a…
A central challenge to many fields of science and engineering involves minimizing non-convex error functions over continuous, high dimensional spaces. Gradient descent or quasi-Newton methods are almost ubiquitously used to perform such…
Smooth convex minimization over the unit trace-norm ball is an important optimization problem in machine learning, signal processing, statistics and other fields, that underlies many tasks in which one wishes to recover a low-rank matrix…
We consider semidefinite programs (SDPs) with equality constraints. The variable to be optimized is a positive semidefinite matrix $X$ of size $n$. Following the Burer--Monteiro approach, we optimize a factor $Y$ of size $n \times p$…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…
We propose a trust-region type method for a class of nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems where the objective function is a summation of a (probably nonconvex) smooth function and a (probably nonsmooth) convex function. The model…
We present distributed subgradient methods for min-max problems with agreement constraints on a subset of the arguments of both the convex and concave parts. Applications include constrained minimization problems where each constraint is a…
We consider a generic convex optimization problem associated with regularized empirical risk minimization of linear predictors. The problem structure allows us to reformulate it as a convex-concave saddle point problem. We propose a…
In this paper, we consider a bilevel polynomial optimization problem where the objective and the constraint functions of both the upper and the lower level problems are polynomials. We present methods for finding its global minimizers and…
Recently, saddle point problems have received much attention due to their powerful modeling capability for a lot of problems from diverse domains. Applications of these problems occur in many applied areas, such as robust optimization,…
For finite-dimensional problems, stochastic approximation methods have long been used to solve stochastic optimization problems. Their application to infinite-dimensional problems is less understood, particularly for nonconvex objectives.…
Large-scale non-convex optimization problems are expensive to solve due to computational and memory costs. To reduce the costs, first-order (computationally efficient) and asynchronous-parallel (memory efficient) algorithms are necessary to…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) problems are challenging to solve because of their high dimensionality. However, solving sparse SDP problems with small tree-width are known to be relatively easier because: (1) they can be decomposed into…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is widely used in machine learning research. Previous convergence analyses of SGD under the vanishing step-size setting typically require Robbins-Monro conditions. However, in practice, a wider variety of…
We study the maximum $k$-colorable subgraph (M$k$CS) problem, which consists in finding a largest $k$-colorable induced subgraph in a given graph. We consider a Semidefinite Programming (SDP) relaxation for the M$k$CS problem and regard its…
This work is concerned with approximating constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) with an additional global cardinality constraints. For example, \maxcut is a boolean CSP where the input is a graph $G = (V,E)$ and the goal is to find a cut…
A new approach to solving a class of rankconstrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems, which appear in many signal processing applications such as transmit beamspace design in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar, downlink…
Exploiting sparsity in Semidefinite Programs (SDP) is critical to solving large-scale problems. The chordal completion based maximal clique decomposition is the preferred approach for exploiting sparsity in SDPs. In this paper, we show that…
This paper develops a new storage-optimal algorithm that provably solves generic semidefinite programs (SDPs) in standard form. This method is particularly effective for weakly constrained SDPs. The key idea is to formulate an approximate…