Related papers: Accelerated first-order methods for a class of sem…
Recent work on approximate linear programming (ALP) techniques for first-order Markov Decision Processes (FOMDPs) represents the value function linearly w.r.t. a set of first-order basis functions and uses linear programming techniques to…
This paper presents the Safe Sequential Quadratically Constrained Quadratic Programming (SS-QCQP) algorithm, a first-order method for smooth inequality-constrained nonconvex optimization that guarantees feasibility at every iteration. The…
Semidefinite programs are an important class of convex optimization problems. It can be solved efficiently by SDP solvers in Matlab, such as SeDuMi, SDPT3, DSDP. However, since we are running fixed precision SDP solvers in Matlab, for some…
We study graph clustering in the Stochastic Block Model (SBM) in the presence of both large clusters and small, unrecoverable clusters. Previous convex relaxation approaches achieving exact recovery do not allow any small clusters of size…
We study the maximization of sums of heterogeneous quadratic forms over the Stiefel manifold, a nonconvex problem that arises in several modern signal processing and machine learning applications such as heteroscedastic probabilistic…
We propose an efficient approach to semidefinite spectral clustering (SSC), which addresses the Frobenius normalization with the positive semidefinite (p.s.d.) constraint for spectral clustering. Compared with the original Frobenius norm…
In this paper, we study a class of stochastic and finite-sum convex optimization problems with deterministic constraints. Existing methods typically aim to find an $\epsilon$-$expectedly\ feasible\ stochastic\ optimal$ solution, in which…
This paper proposes low-complexity algorithms for finding approximate second-order stationary points (SOSPs) of problems with smooth non-convex objective and linear constraints. While finding (approximate) SOSPs is computationally…
In solving hard computational problems, semidefinite program (SDP) relaxations often play an important role because they come with a guarantee of optimality. Here, we focus on a popular semidefinite relaxation of K-means clustering which…
We propose a new homotopy-based conditional gradient method for solving convex optimization problems with a large number of simple conic constraints. Instances of this template naturally appear in semidefinite programming problems arising…
The accuracy and complexity of machine learning algorithms based on kernel optimization are determined by the set of kernels over which they are able to optimize. An ideal set of kernels should: admit a linear parameterization (for…
Stochastic First-Order (SFO) methods have been a cornerstone in addressing a broad spectrum of modern machine learning (ML) challenges. However, their efficacy is increasingly questioned, especially in large-scale applications where…
We introduce a new approximate solution technique for first-order Markov decision processes (FOMDPs). Representing the value function linearly w.r.t. a set of first-order basis functions, we compute suitable weights by casting the…
We present a new generic approach to the condensed-matter ground-state problem which is complementary to variational techniques and works directly in the thermodynamic limit. Relaxing the ground-state problem, we obtain semidefinite…
This thesis explores algorithmic applications and limitations of convex relaxation hierarchies for approximating some discrete and continuous optimization problems. - We show a dichotomy of approximability of constraint satisfaction…
We present exact mixed-integer linear programming formulations for verifying the performance of first-order methods for parametric quadratic optimization. We formulate the verification problem as a mixed-integer linear program where the…
Mirror descent (MD) is a powerful first-order optimization technique that subsumes several optimization algorithms including gradient descent (GD). In this work, we develop a semi-definite programming (SDP) framework to analyze the…
Semidefinite programming is an indispensable tool in computer vision, but general-purpose solvers for semidefinite programs are often too slow and memory intensive for large-scale problems. We propose a general framework to approximately…
This paper develops new semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation techniques for two classes of mixed binary quadratically constrained quadratic programs (MBQCQP) and analyzes their approximation performance. The first class of problem…
Many computer vision problems can be formulated as binary quadratic programs (BQPs). Two classic relaxation methods are widely used for solving BQPs, namely, spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each with their own…