Related papers: Slide Reduction, Revisited---Filling the Gaps in S…

A path from s to t on a polyhedral terrain is descending if the height of a point p never increases while we move p along the path from s to t. No efficient algorithm is known to find a shortest descending path (SDP) from s to t in a…

The singular value decomposition (SVD) is a crucial tool in machine learning and statistical data analysis. However, it is highly susceptible to outliers in the data matrix. Existing robust SVD algorithms often sacrifice speed for…

We consider gradient descent like algorithms for Support Vector Machine (SVM) training when the data is in relational form. The gradient of the SVM objective can not be efficiently computed by known techniques as it suffers from the…

Given a simple graph $G = (V, E)$ and a constant integer $k \ge 2$, the $k$-path vertex cover problem ({\sc P$k$VC}) asks for a minimum subset $F \subseteq V$ of vertices such that the induced subgraph $G[V - F]$ does not contain any path…

Given a graph $G = (V, E)$, we wish to compute a spanning tree whose maximum vertex degree, i.e. tree degree, is as small as possible. Computing the exact optimal solution is known to be NP-hard, since it generalizes the Hamiltonian path…

We present an algorithm for minimizing an objective with hard-to-compute gradients by using a related, easier-to-access function as a proxy. Our algorithm is based on approximate proximal point iterations on the proxy combined with…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is a simple and popular method to solve stochastic optimization problems which arise in machine learning. For strongly convex problems, its convergence rate was known to be O(\log(T)/T), by running SGD for…

In this work we present a quadratic programming approximation of the Semi-Supervised Support Vector Machine (S3VM) problem, namely approximate QP-S3VM, that can be efficiently solved using off the shelf optimization packages. We prove that…

The shortest vector problem (SVP) over ideal lattices is closely related to the Ring-LWE problem, which is widely used to build post-quantum cryptosystems. Power-of-two cyclotomic fields are frequently adopted to instantiate Ring-LWE. Pan…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization methods are nowadays the method of choice for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) in artificial intelligence systems. In practically relevant training problems, usually not the plain…

In 1982, Lagarias showed that solving the approximate Shortest Vector Problem also solves the problem of finding good simultaneous Diophantine approximations. Here we provide a deterministic, dimension-preserving reduction in the reverse…

The Shortest Lattice Vector (SLV) problem is in general hard to solve, except for special cases (such as root lattices and lattices for which an obtuse superbase is known). In this paper, we present a new class of SLV problems that can be…

The support vector machine (SVM) algorithm is well known to the computer learning community for its very good practical results. The goal of the present paper is to study this algorithm from a statistical perspective, using tools of…

We show a linear-size reduction from gap Max-2-Lin(2) (a generalization of the gap $\mathrm{Max}$-$\mathrm{Cut}$ problem) to $\gamma\text{-}\mathrm{CVP}_p$ for $\gamma = \mathrm{O}(1)$ and finite $p\geq 1$, as well as a no-go theorem…

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) gives an optimal convergence rate when minimizing convex stochastic objectives $f(x)$. However, in terms of making the gradients small, the original SGD does not give an optimal rate, even when $f(x)$ is…

A classical problem in matrix computations is the efficient and reliable approximation of a given matrix by a matrix of lower rank. The truncated singular value decomposition (SVD) is known to provide the best such approximation for any…

We present an algorithm that given any invertible symmetric diagonally dominant M-matrix (SDDM), i.e., a principal submatrix of a graph Laplacian, $\boldsymbol{\mathit{L}}$ and a nonnegative vector $\boldsymbol{\mathit{b}}$, computes an…

We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…

Building on the previous work of Lee et al. and Ferdinand et al. on coded computation, we propose a sequential approximation framework for solving optimization problems in a distributed manner. In a distributed computation system, latency…

This paper analyzes the trajectories of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) to help understand the algorithm's convergence properties in non-convex problems. We first show that the sequence of iterates generated by SGD remains bounded and…