Related papers: From Sampling to Optimization on Discrete Domains …
The simplex algorithm for linear programming is based on the fact that any local optimum with respect to the polyhedral neighborhood is also a global optimum. We show that a similar result carries over to submodular maximization. In…
This work explores a novel perspective on solving nonconvex and nonsmooth optimization problems by leveraging sampling based methods. Instead of treating the objective function purely through traditional (often deterministic) optimization…
We provide a theoretical algorithm for checking local optimality and escaping saddles at nondifferentiable points of empirical risks of two-layer ReLU networks. Our algorithm receives any parameter value and returns: local minimum,…
Finding a local minimum or maximum of a function is often achieved through the gradient-descent optimization method. For a function in dimension d, the gradient requires to compute at each step d partial derivatives. This method is for…
Let $\mathcal{D}$ be a set family that is the solution domain of some combinatorial problem. The \emph{max-min diversification problem on $\mathcal{D}$} is the problem to select $k$ sets from $\mathcal{D}$ such that the Hamming distance…
Given a $d$-dimensional continuous (resp. discrete) probability distribution $\mu$ and a discrete distribution $\nu$, the semi-discrete (resp. discrete) Optimal Transport (OT) problem asks for computing a minimum-cost plan to transport mass…
In this work, we examine sampling problems with non-smooth potentials. We propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from non-smooth potentials. We provide a non-asymptotical analysis of our algorithm and establish a…
Given a matrix $A$ and $k\geq 0$, we study the problem of finding the $k\times k$ submatrix of $A$ with the maximum determinant in absolute value. This problem is motivated by the question of computing the determinant-based lower bound of…
We study the problem of parallelizing sampling from distributions related to determinants: symmetric, nonsymmetric, and partition-constrained determinantal point processes, as well as planar perfect matchings. For these distributions, the…
This paper considers non-smooth optimization problems where we seek to minimize the pointwise maximum of a continuously parameterized family of functions. Since the objective function is given as the solution to a maximization problem,…
Optimal Transport (OT) based distances are powerful tools for machine learning to compare probability measures and manipulate them using OT maps. In this field, a setting of interest is semi-discrete OT, where the source measure $\mu$ is…
Given a source of iid samples of edges of an input graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, how many samples does one need to compute a constant factor approximation to the maximum matching size in $G$? Moreover, is it possible to obtain…
Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint…
In this paper, we develop a distributed algorithm for solving a class of distributed convex optimization problems where the local objective functions can be a general nonsmooth function, and all equalities and inequalities are network-wide…
This paper investigates solving convex composite optimization on an undirected network, where each node, privately endowed with a smooth component function and a nonsmooth one, is required to minimize the sum of all the component functions…
In this work, we give efficient algorithms for privately estimating a Gaussian distribution in both pure and approximate differential privacy (DP) models with optimal dependence on the dimension in the sample complexity. In the pure DP…
We study the fundamental problem of estimating an unknown discrete distribution $p$ over $d$ symbols, given $n$ i.i.d. samples from the distribution. We are interested in minimizing the KL divergence between the true distribution and the…
Obtaining solutions to Optimal Transportation (OT) problems is typically intractable when the marginal spaces are continuous. Recent research has focused on approximating continuous solutions with discretization methods based on i.i.d.…
Given an $n$-point metric space $(\mathcal{X},d)$ where each point belongs to one of $m=O(1)$ different categories or groups and a set of integers $k_1, \ldots, k_m$, the fair Max-Min diversification problem is to select $k_i$ points…
Recently, min-max optimization problems have received increasing attention due to their wide range of applications in machine learning (ML). However, most existing min-max solution techniques are either single-machine or distributed…