Related papers: Lossless Convexification and Duality
A conic program is the problem of optimizing a linear function over a closed convex cone intersected with an affine preimage of another cone. We analyse three constraint qualifications, namely a Closedness CQ, Slater CQ, and Boundedness CQ…
Stochastic Dual Coordinate Ascent is a popular method for solving regularized loss minimization for the case of convex losses. In this paper we show how a variant of SDCA can be applied for non-convex losses. We prove linear convergence…
The Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) is a cornerstone of optimal control theory, widely studied in both model-based and model-free approaches. Despite its well-established nature, certain foundational aspects remain subtle. In this paper,…
The MaxCut SDP is one of the most well-known semidefinite programs, and it has many favorable properties. One of its nicest geometric/duality properties is the fact that the vertices of its feasible region correspond exactly to the cuts of…
We study the problem of differentially-private (DP) stochastic (convex-concave) saddle-points in the $\ell_1$ setting. We propose $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP algorithms based on stochastic mirror descent that attain nearly…
We develop a general theory of convex duality for certain singular control problems, taking the abstract results by Kramkov and Schachermayer (1999) for optimal expected utility from nonnegative random variables to the level of optimal…
Convex algebraic geometry concerns the interplay between optimization theory and real algebraic geometry. Its objects of study include convex semialgebraic sets that arise in semidefinite programming and from sums of squares. This article…
Given a convex optimization problem and its dual, there are many possible first-order algorithms. In this paper, we show the equivalence between mirror descent algorithms and algorithms generalizing the conditional gradient method. This is…
We consider the global optimization of nonconvex mixed-integer quadratic programs with linear equality constraints. In particular, we present a new class of convex quadratic relaxations which are derived via quadratic cuts. To construct…
We propose a semidefinite programming (SDP) algorithm for community detection in the stochastic block model, a popular model for networks with latent community structure. We prove that our algorithm achieves exact recovery of the latent…
In this paper we derive necessary optimality conditions for optimal control problems with nonlinear and nonsmooth implicit control systems. Implicit control systems have wide applications including differential algebraic equations (DAEs).…
In this article we dwell into the class of so called ill posed Linear Inverse Problems (LIP) in machine learning, which has become almost a classic in recent times. The fundamental task in an LIP is to recover the entire signal / data from…
Based on concepts like kth convex hull and finer characterization of nonconvexity of a function, we propose a refinement of the Shapley-Folkman lemma and derive a new estimate for the duality gap of nonconvex optimization problems with…
A broad class of convex optimization problems can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP), minimization of a convex function over the positive-semidefinite cone subject to some affine constraints. The majority of classical SDP solvers…
This paper studies parameterized stochastic optimization problems in finite discrete time that arise in many applications in operations research and mathematical finance. We prove the existence of solutions and the absence of a duality gap…
Quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs) are a fundamental class of optimization problems well-known to be NP-hard in general. In this paper we study sufficient conditions for a convex hull result that immediately implies that…
We consider a stochastic control problem where the set of strict (classical) controls is not necessarily convex, and the system is governed by a nonlinear backward stochastic differential equation. By introducing a new approach, we…
Given an affine space of matrices $\mathcal{L}$ and a matrix $\Theta\in \mathcal{L}$, consider the problem of computing the closest rank deficient matrix to $\Theta$ on $\mathcal{L}$ with respect to the Frobenius norm. This is a nonconvex…
Semidefinite programs (SDPs) and their solvers are powerful tools with many applications in machine learning and data science. Designing scalable SDP solvers is challenging because by standard the positive semidefinite decision variable is…
In real-world applications, it is important for machine learning algorithms to be robust against data outliers or corruptions. In this paper, we focus on improving the robustness of a large class of learning algorithms that are formulated…