Related papers: Convex envelopes for ray-concave functions
The paper considers the minimization of a separable convex function subject to linear ascending constraints. The problem arises as the core optimization in several resource allocation scenarios, and is a special case of an optimization of a…
Given noisy data, function estimation is considered when the unknown function is known apriori to consist of a small number of regions where the function is either convex or concave. When the regions are known apriori, the estimate is…
In this paper we introduce two conceptual algorithms for minimising abstract convex functions. Both algorithms rely on solving a proximal-type subproblem with an abstract Bregman distance based proximal term. We prove their convergence when…
Motivated by the fact that not all nonconvex optimization problems are difficult to solve, we survey in this paper three widely-used ways to reveal the hidden convex structure for different classes of nonconvex optimization problems.…
We investigate convexification for convex quadratic optimization with step function penalties. Such problems can be cast as mixed-integer quadratic optimization problems, where binary variables are used to encode the non-convex step…
Extending classical results on polytopal approximation of convex bodies, we derive asymptotic formulas for the weighted approximation of smooth convex functions by piecewise affine convex functions as the number of their facets tends to…
Highly concentrated functions play an important role in many research fields including control system analysis and physics, and they turned out to be the key idea behind inverse Laplace transform methods as well. This paper uses the…
Convex nonsmooth optimization problems, whose solutions live in very high dimensional spaces, have become ubiquitous. To solve them, the class of first-order algorithms known as proximal splitting algorithms is particularly adequate: they…
Approximating a function with a finite series, e.g., involving polynomials or trigonometric functions, is a critical tool in computing and data analysis. The construction of such approximations via now-standard approaches like least squares…
Functions that are piecewise defined are a common sight in mathematics while convexity is a property especially desired in optimization. Suppose now a piecewise-defined function is convex on each of its defining components - when can we…
Submodular continuous functions are a category of (generally) non-convex/non-concave functions with a wide spectrum of applications. We characterize these functions and demonstrate that they can be maximized efficiently with approximation…
In this work, we consider constrained stochastic optimization problems under hidden convexity, i.e., those that admit a convex reformulation via non-linear (but invertible) map $c(\cdot)$. A number of non-convex problems ranging from…
This paper defines a convertible nonconvex function(CN function for short) and a weak (strong) uniform (decomposable, exact) CN function, proves the optimization conditions for their global solutions and proposes algorithms for solving the…
This paper studies distributionally robust optimization for a rich class of risk measures with ambiguity sets defined by $\phi$-divergences. The risk measures are allowed to be non-linear in probabilities, are represented by Choquet…
Convex regression is the problem of fitting a convex function to a data set consisting of input-output pairs. We present a new approach to this problem called spectrahedral regression, in which we fit a spectrahedral function to the data,…
Non-convex optimization is ubiquitous in modern machine learning. Researchers devise non-convex objective functions and optimize them using off-the-shelf optimizers such as stochastic gradient descent and its variants, which leverage the…
Logconcave functions represent the current frontier of efficient algorithms for sampling, optimization and integration in R^n. Efficient sampling algorithms to sample according to a probability density (to which the other two problems can…
Relative to the large literature on upper bounds on complexity of convex optimization, lesser attention has been paid to the fundamental hardness of these problems. Given the extensive use of convex optimization in machine learning and…
This paper investigates functions from $\mathbb{R}^d$ to $\mathbb{R} \cup \{\pm \infty\}$ that satisfy axioms of linearity wherever allowed by extended-value arithmetic. They have a nontrivial structure defined inductively on $d$, and…
This paper presents a piecewise convexification method for solving non-convex multi-objective optimization problems with box constraints. Based on the ideas of the $\alpha$-based Branch and Bound (${\rm \alpha BB}$) method of global…