Related papers: On Densest $k$-Subgraph Mining and Diagonal Loadin…
Dense subgraph extraction is a fundamental problem in graph analysis and data mining, aimed at identifying cohesive and densely connected substructures within a given graph. It plays a crucial role in various domains, including social…
In the $k$-Disjoint Shortest Paths ($k$-DSP) problem, we are given a weighted graph $G$ on $n$ nodes and $m$ edges with specified source vertices $s_1, \dots, s_k$, and target vertices $t_1, \dots, t_k$, and are tasked with determining if…
The Frank-Wolfe algorithm is a classic method for constrained optimization problems. It has recently been popular in many machine learning applications because its projection-free property leads to more efficient iterations. In this paper,…
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown great success in many machine learning tasks. Their training is challenging since the loss surface of the network architecture is generally non-convex, or even non-smooth. How and under what…
Decomposing hypergraphs is a key task in hypergraph analysis with broad applications in community detection, pattern discovery, and task scheduling. Existing approaches such as $k$-core and neighbor-$k$-core rely on vertex degree…
For the linear inverse problem with sparsity constraints, the $l_0$ regularized problem is NP-hard, and existing approaches either utilize greedy algorithms to find almost-optimal solutions or to approximate the $l_0$ regularization with…
Minimax problems have recently attracted a lot of research interests. A few efforts have been made to solve decentralized nonconvex strongly-concave (NCSC) minimax-structured optimization; however, all of them focus on smooth problems with…
In this work, we consider the Submodular Maximization under Knapsack (SMK) constraint problem over the ground set of size $n$. The problem recently attracted a lot of attention due to its applications in various domains of combination…
Deep Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning methods have empirically shown great promise in tackling challenging combinatorial problems. In those methods a deep neural network is used as a solution generator which is then trained by…
A signed graph is a graph where each edge receives a sign, positive or negative. The signed graph model has been used in many real applications, such as protein complex discovery and social network analysis. Finding cohesive subgraphs in…
We study the Sum of Squares (SoS) Hierarchy with a view towards combinatorial optimization. We survey the use of the SoS hierarchy to obtain approximation algorithms on graphs using their spectral properties. We present a simplified proof…
In this paper, we propose an exact general algorithm for solving non-convex optimization problems, where the non-convexity arises due to the presence of an inverse S-shaped function. The proposed method involves iteratively approximating…
Consensus optimization enables autonomous agents to solve joint tasks through peer-to-peer exchanges alone. Classical decentralized gradient descent is appealing for its minimal state but fails to achieve exact consensus with fixed…
We introduce a new projection-free (Frank-Wolfe) method for optimizing structured nonconvex functions that are expressed as a difference of two convex functions. This problem class subsumes smooth nonconvex minimization, positioning our…
We study the optimization landscape of a smooth nonconvex program arising from synchronization over the two-element group $\mathbf{Z}_2$, that is, recovering $z_1, \dots, z_n \in \{\pm 1\}$ from (noisy) relative measurements $R_{ij} \approx…
The $k$-defective clique model relaxes the strict completeness constraint of the traditional clique by allowing up to $k$ missing edges, providing a robust formulation for detecting cohesive structures in noisy graphs. Consequently, the…
Gradient-flow (GF) viewpoints unify and illuminate optimization algorithms, yet most GF analyses focus on unconstrained settings. We develop a geometry-respecting framework for constrained problems by (i) reparameterizing feasible sets with…
Clustering is a fundamental unsupervised learning approach. Many clustering algorithms -- such as $k$-means -- rely on the euclidean distance as a similarity measure, which is often not the most relevant metric for high dimensional data…
Finding cohesive subgraphs in a large graph has many important applications, such as community detection and biological network analysis. Clique is often a too strict cohesive structure since communities or biological modules rarely form as…
Many real-world networks can be modeled as graphs. Finding dense subgraphs is a key problem in graph mining with applications in diverse domains. In this paper, we consider two variants of the densest subgraph problem where multiple graph…