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We study the convex relaxation of a polynomial optimization problem, maximizing a product of linear forms over the complex sphere. We show that this convex program is also a relaxation of the permanent of Hermitian positive semidefinite…
Despite its important applications in Machine Learning, min-max optimization of nonconvex-nonconcave objectives remains elusive. Not only are there no known first-order methods converging even to approximate local min-max points, but the…
This paper explores the non-convex composition optimization in the form including inner and outer finite-sum functions with a large number of component functions. This problem arises in some important applications such as nonlinear…
The problem of optimizing over the cone of nonnegative polynomials is a fundamental problem in computational mathematics, with applications to polynomial optimization, control, machine learning, game theory, and combinatorics, among others.…
In this work, we consider robust submodular maximization with matroid constraints. We give an efficient bi-criteria approximation algorithm that outputs a small family of feasible sets whose union has (nearly) optimal objective value. This…
Low-rank modeling has many important applications in computer vision and machine learning. While the matrix rank is often approximated by the convex nuclear norm, the use of nonconvex low-rank regularizers has demonstrated better empirical…
Result diversification is an important aspect in web-based search, document summarization, facility location, portfolio management and other applications. Given a set of ranked results for a set of objects (e.g. web documents, facilities,…
This two-part paper is concerned with the problem of minimizing a linear objective function subject to a bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) constraint. In this part, we first consider a family of convex relaxations which transform BMI…
We develop a distributed algorithm for convex Empirical Risk Minimization, the problem of minimizing large but finite sum of convex functions over networks. The proposed algorithm is derived from directly discretizing the second-order…
We describe a factor-revealing convex optimization problem for the integrality gap of the maximum-cut semidefinite programming relaxation: for each $n \geq 2$ we present a convex optimization problem whose optimal value is the largest…
Difference of convex (DC) functions cover a broad family of non-convex and possibly non-smooth and non-differentiable functions, and have wide applications in machine learning and statistics. Although deterministic algorithms for DC…
Suppose that there is a ground set which consists of a large number of vectors in a Hilbert space. Consider the problem of selecting a subset of the ground set such that the projection of a vector of interest onto the subspace spanned by…
Symmetric submodular maximization is an important class of combinatorial optimization problems, including MAX-CUT on graphs and hyper-graphs. The state-of-the-art algorithm for the problem over general constraints has an approximation ratio…
Maximizing submodular functions has been increasingly used in many applications of machine learning, such as data summarization, recommendation systems, and feature selection. Moreover, there has been a growing interest in both submodular…
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…
For two matroids $M_1$ and $M_2$ with the same ground set $V$ and two cost functions $w_1$ and $w_2$ on $2^V$, we consider the problem of finding bases $X_1$ of $M_1$ and $X_2$ of $M_2$ minimizing $w_1(X_1)+w_2(X_2)$ subject to a certain…
We present a new feasible proximal gradient method for constrained optimization where both the objective and constraint functions are given by the summation of a smooth, possibly nonconvex function and a convex simple function. The…
Globally optimizing a nonconvex quadratic over the intersection of $m$ balls in $\mathbb{R}^n$ is known to be polynomial-time solvable for fixed $m$. Moreover, when $m=1$, the standard semidefinite relaxation is exact. When $m=2$, it has…
We approach the Max-3-Cut problem through the lens of maximizing complex-valued quadratic forms and demonstrate that low-rank structure in the objective matrix can be exploited, leading to alternative algorithms to classical semidefinite…
We study the following problem: Given a variable of interest, we would like to find a best linear predictor for it by choosing a subset of $k$ relevant variables obeying a matroid constraint. This problem is a natural generalization of…