Related papers: The Local Landscape of Phase Retrieval Under Limit…
The phase retrieval problem is concerned with recovering an unknown signal $\bf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n$ from a set of magnitude-only measurements $y_j=|\langle \bf{a}_j,\bf{x} \rangle|, \; j=1,\ldots,m$. A natural least squares formulation can…
We present a mathematical analysis of a non-convex energy landscape for robust subspace recovery. We prove that an underlying subspace is the only stationary point and local minimizer in a specified neighborhood under a deterministic…
In this paper we investigate how gradient-based algorithms such as gradient descent, (multi-pass) stochastic gradient descent, its persistent variant, and the Langevin algorithm navigate non-convex loss-landscapes and which of them is able…
The recovery of a signal from the intensity measurements with some entries being known in advance is termed as {\em affine phase retrieval}. In this paper, we prove that a natural least squares formulation for the affine phase retrieval is…
Non-convex optimization with local search heuristics has been widely used in machine learning, achieving many state-of-art results. It becomes increasingly important to understand why they can work for these NP-hard problems on typical…
We propose a tensor-based criterion for benign landscape in phase retrieval and establish boundedness of gradient trajectories. This implies that gradient descent will converge to a global minimum for almost every initial point.
We consider a popular nonsmooth formulation of the real phase retrieval problem. We show that under standard statistical assumptions, a simple subgradient method converges linearly when initialized within a constant relative distance of an…
This paper considers the recovery of a rank $r$ positive semidefinite matrix $X X^T\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times n}$ from $m$ scalar measurements of the form $y_i := a_i^T X X^T a_i$ (i.e., quadratic measurements of $X$). Such problems arise in a…
This paper considers the problem of solving systems of quadratic equations, namely, recovering an object of interest $\mathbf{x}^{\natural}\in\mathbb{R}^{n}$ from $m$ quadratic equations/samples…
We study the non-convex optimization landscape for maximum likelihood estimation in the discrete orbit recovery model with Gaussian noise. This model is motivated by applications in molecular microscopy and image processing, where each…
Many recent problems in signal processing and machine learning such as compressed sensing, image restoration, matrix/tensor recovery, and non-negative matrix factorization can be cast as constrained optimization. Projected gradient descent…
A fundamental task in phase retrieval is to recover an unknown signal $\vx\in \Rn$ from a set of magnitude-only measurements $y_i=\abs{\nj{\va_i,\vx}}, \; i=1,\ldots,m$. In this paper, we propose two novel perturbed amplitude models (PAMs)…
Traditional landscape analysis of deep neural networks aims to show that no sub-optimal local minima exist in some appropriate sense. From this, one may be tempted to conclude that descent algorithms which escape saddle points will reach a…
In this paper we develop a new framework that captures the common landscape underlying the common non-convex low-rank matrix problems including matrix sensing, matrix completion and robust PCA. In particular, we show for all above problems…
We study nonconvex optimization for phase retrieval and the more general problem of semidefinite low-rank matrix sensing; in particular, we focus on the global nonconvex landscape of overparametrized versions of the nonsmooth amplitude…
Local loss-landscape stabilization under sample growth is typically measured either pointwise or through isotropic averaging in the full parameter space. Despite practical value, both choices probe directions that contribute little to the…
Many problems in high-dimensional statistics and optimization involve minimization over nonconvex constraints-for instance, a rank constraint for a matrix estimation problem-but little is known about the theoretical properties of such…
A linear and thus convex phase retrieval algorithm for the application in phaseless near-field far-field transformations is presented. The formulation exploits locally known phase relations among sets of measurement samples, which can in…
Many data-fitting applications require the solution of an optimization problem involving a sum of large number of functions of high dimensional parameter. Here, we consider the problem of minimizing a sum of $n$ functions over a convex…
We consider optimization problems in which the goal is find a $k$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{R}^n$, $k<<n$, which minimizes a convex and smooth loss. Such problems generalize the fundamental task of principal component analysis (PCA)…