Related papers: Efficient semidefinite-programming-based inference…

Random projection, a dimensionality reduction technique, has been found useful in recent years for reducing the size of optimization problems. In this paper, we explore the use of sparse sub-gaussian random projections to approximate…

In this paper we relate the partition function to the max-statistics of random variables. In particular, we provide a novel framework for approximating and bounding the partition function using MAP inference on randomly perturbed models. As…

Extreme environmental events frequently exhibit spatial and temporal dependence. These data are often modeled using max stable processes (MSPs). MSPs are computationally prohibitive to fit for as few as a dozen observations, with supposed…

We express the optimization of entanglement witnesses for arbitrary bipartite states in terms of a class of convex optimization problems known as Robust Semidefinite Programs (RSDP). We propose, using well known properties of RSDP, several…

We consider the NP-hard problem of minimizing a convex quadratic function over the integer lattice ${\bf Z}^n$. We present a simple semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for obtaining a nontrivial lower bound on the optimal value of the…

We consider the NP-hard problem of MAP-inference for undirected discrete graphical models. We propose a polynomial time and practically efficient algorithm for finding a part of its optimal solution. Specifically, our algorithm marks some…

The multireference alignment problem consists of estimating a signal from multiple noisy shifted observations. Inspired by existing Unique-Games approximation algorithms, we provide a semidefinite program (SDP) based relaxation which…

Despite the numerous uses of semidefinite programming (SDP) and its universal solvability via interior point methods (IPMs), it is rarely applied to practical large-scale problems. This mainly owes to the computational cost of IPMs that…

In this paper, we study a class of nonsmooth fractional programs {\rm (FP, for short)} with SOS-convex semi-algebraic functions. Under suitable assumptions, we derive a strong duality result between the problem (FP) and its semidefinite…

Scalable high-quality MAP inference in arbitrary-order Markov Random Fields (MRFs) remains challenging. Approximate message-passing methods are often efficient but can degrade on dense or high-order instances, while exact solvers such as…

Semantic segmentation tasks can be well modeled by Markov Random Field (MRF). This paper addresses semantic segmentation by incorporating high-order relations and mixture of label contexts into MRF. Unlike previous works that optimized MRFs…

Dense conditional random fields (CRF) with Gaussian pairwise potentials have emerged as a popular framework for several computer vision applications such as stereo correspondence and semantic segmentation. By modeling long-range…

Bayesian whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysis with three-dimensional spatial smoothing priors has been shown to produce state-of-the-art activity maps without pre-smoothing the data. The proposed inference…

Statistical inference problems arising within signal processing, data mining, and machine learning naturally give rise to hard combinatorial optimization problems. These problems become intractable when the dimensionality of the data is…

In the paper we address the problem of finding the most probable state of discrete Markov random field (MRF) with associative pairwise terms. Although of practical importance, this problem is known to be NP-hard in general. We propose a new…

Pairwise Markov Random Fields (MRFs) or undirected graphical models are parsimonious representations of joint probability distributions. Variables correspond to nodes of a graph, with edges between nodes corresponding to conditional…

The prevalence of spatially referenced multivariate data has impelled researchers to develop a procedure for the joint modeling of multiple spatial processes. This ordinarily involves modeling marginal and cross-process dependence for any…

We address the problem of efficient sparse fixed-rank (S-FR) matrix decomposition, i.e., splitting a corrupted matrix $M$ into an uncorrupted matrix $L$ of rank $r$ and a sparse matrix of outliers $S$. Fixed-rank constraints are usually…

We give the first approximation algorithm for mixed packing and covering semidefinite programs (SDPs) with polylogarithmic dependence on width. Mixed packing and covering SDPs constitute a fundamental algorithmic primitive with recent…

This paper addresses the problem of planning under uncertainty in large Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Factored MDPs represent a complex state space using state variables and the transition model using a dynamic Bayesian network. This…