Related papers: A convex relaxation to compute the nearest structu…
This paper studies an optimization problem on the sum of traces of matrix quadratic forms in $m$ semi-orthogonal matrices, which can be considered as a generalization of the synchronization of rotations. While the problem is nonconvex, the…
We present a new generic approach to the condensed-matter ground-state problem which is complementary to variational techniques and works directly in the thermodynamic limit. Relaxing the ground-state problem, we obtain semidefinite…
We consider a new hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations for the general polynomial optimization problem $(P):\:f^{\ast}=\min \{\,f(x):x\in K\,\}$ on a compact basic semi-algebraic set $K\subset\R^n$. This hierarchy combines some advantages…
The trust-region problem, which minimizes a nonconvex quadratic function over a ball, is a key subproblem in trust-region methods for solving nonlinear optimization problems. It enjoys many attractive properties such as an exact…
We study the problem of estimating low-rank matrices from linear measurements (a.k.a., matrix sensing) through nonconvex optimization. We propose an efficient stochastic variance reduced gradient descent algorithm to solve a nonconvex…
Exact solution of hard combinatorial optimization problems often relies on strong convex relaxations, but solving these relaxations repeatedly inside a branch-and-bound algorithm can be prohibitively expensive. Hence, we consider this…
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},…
The problem of minimizing the rank of a symmetric positive semidefinite matrix subject to constraints can be cast equivalently as a semidefinite program with complementarity constraints (SDCMPCC). The formulation requires two positive…
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…
The linearly constrained matrix rank minimization problem is widely applicable in many fields such as control, signal processing and system identification. The tightest convex relaxation of this problem is the linearly constrained nuclear…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
We consider a parametric family of quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQP) and their associated semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. Given a nominal value of the parameter at which the SDP relaxation is exact, we study…
Matrix learning is at the core of many machine learning problems. A number of real-world applications such as collaborative filtering and text mining can be formulated as a low-rank matrix completion problem, which recovers incomplete…
In this paper, we consider an SDP relaxation of the quadratic knapsack problem (QKP). After using the Burer-Monteiro factorization, we get a non-convex optimization problem, whose feasible region is an algebraic variety. Although there…
Semidefinite programming (SDP) provides a principled framework for convex relaxations of nonconvex geometric constraints in motion planning, yet existing solvers are too computationally expensive for real-time control, particularly on…
This paper focuses on the study of a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints, where the objective and the constraint functions are all polynomials. We present a method for finding its global minimizers and global minimum using a…
Motivated by recent work on atomic norms in inverse problems, we propose a new approach to line spectral estimation that provides theoretical guarantees for the mean-squared-error (MSE) performance in the presence of noise and without…
This paper addresses the problem of control synthesis for nonlinear optimal control problems in the presence of state and input constraints. The presented approach relies upon transforming the given problem into an infinite-dimensional…
We consider convex relaxations for recovering low-rank tensors based on constrained minimization over a ball induced by the tensor nuclear norm, recently introduced in \cite{tensor_tSVD}. We build on a recent line of results that considered…
We consider the problem of estimating the discrete clustering structures under the Sub-Gaussian Mixture Model. Our main results establish a hidden integrality property of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for this problem: while…