Related papers: A convex relaxation to compute the nearest structu…
Low rank matrix recovery problems appear widely in statistics, combinatorics, and imaging. One celebrated method for solving these problems is to formulate and solve a semidefinite program (SDP). It is often known that the exact solution to…
Consider $N$ points in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and $M$ local coordinate systems that are related through unknown rigid transforms. For each point we are given (possibly noisy) measurements of its local coordinates in some of the coordinate systems.…
We propose a simple, scalable, and fast gradient descent algorithm to optimize a nonconvex objective for the rank minimization problem and a closely related family of semidefinite programs. With $O(r^3 \kappa^2 n \log n)$ random…
Many nonconvex problems in robotics can be relaxed into convex formulations via Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) that can be solved to global optimality. The practical quality of these solutions, however, critically depends on rounding them…
Rank minimization is of interest in machine learning applications such as recommender systems and robust principal component analysis. Minimizing the convex relaxation to the rank minimization problem, the nuclear norm, is an effective…
Many problems of systems control theory boil down to solving polynomial equations, polynomial inequalities or polyomial differential equations. Recent advances in convex optimization and real algebraic geometry can be combined to generate…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) often arise in relaxations of some NP-hard problems, and if the solution of the SDP obeys certain rank constraints, the relaxation will be tight. Decomposition methods based on chordal sparsity have already been…
This paper studies how to compute global minimizers of the cubic-quartic regularization (CQR) problem \[ \min_{s \in \mathbb{R}^n} \quad f_0+g^Ts+\frac{1}{2}s^THs+\frac{\beta}{6} \| s \|^3+\frac{\sigma}{4} \| s \|^4, \] where $f_0$ is a…
We develop tractable convex relaxations for rank-constrained quadratic optimization problems over $n \times m$ matrices, a setting for which tractable relaxations are typically only available when the objective or constraints admit spectral…
We consider optimization problems containing nonconvex quadratic functions for which semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations often yield strong bounds. We investigate linear inequalities that outer approximate the positive semidefinite…
The technique of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation can be used to obtain a nontrivial bound on the optimal value of a nonconvex quadratically constrained quadratic program (QCQP). We explore concave quadratic inequalities that hold…
We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on $n$-vertex graphs are not the…
We investigate exact semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the problem of minimizing a nonconvex quadratic objective function over a feasible region defined by both finitely and infinitely many nonconvex quadratic inequality…
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 study the maximization of sums of heterogeneous quadratic forms over the Stiefel manifold, a nonconvex problem that arises in several modern signal processing and machine learning applications such as heteroscedastic probabilistic…
In recent years, there has been remarkable progress in the development of so-called certifiable perception methods, which leverage semidefinite, convex relaxations to find global optima of perception problems in robotics. However, many of…
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 study semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the NP-hard problem of globally optimizing a quadratic function over the Stiefel manifold. We introduce a strengthened relaxation based on two recent ideas in the literature: (i) a…
The use of convex relaxations has lately gained considerable interest in Power Systems. These relaxations play a major role in providing global optimality guarantees for non-convex optimization problems. For the Optimal Power Flow (OPF)…
In this study, we investigate the application of Semidefinite Programming (SDP) to phylogenetics. SDP is a powerful optimization framework that seeks to optimize a linear objective function over the cone of positive semidefinite matrices.…