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Motivated by nonconvex, inconsistent feasibility problems in imaging, the relaxed alternating averaged reflections algorithm, or relaxed Douglas-Rachford algorithm (DR$\lambda$), was first proposed over a decade ago. Convergence results for…
We show a connection between sampling and optimization on discrete domains. For a family of distributions $\mu$ defined on size $k$ subsets of a ground set of elements that is closed under external fields, we show that rapid mixing of…
We analyze stochastic algorithms for optimizing nonconvex, nonsmooth finite-sum problems, where the nonconvex part is smooth and the nonsmooth part is convex. Surprisingly, unlike the smooth case, our knowledge of this fundamental problem…
Dense conditional random fields (CRF) with Gaussian pairwise potentials have emerged as a popular framework for several computer vision applications such as stereo correspondence and semantic segmentation. By modeling long-range…
We study the problem of minimizing a $m$-weakly convex and possibly nonsmooth function. Weak convexity provides a broad framework that subsumes convex, smooth, and many composite nonconvex functions. In this work, we propose a…
Correspondence problems are often modelled as quadratic optimization problems over permutations. Common scalable methods for approximating solutions of these NP-hard problems are the spectral relaxation for non-convex energies and the…
In centralized settings, it is well known that stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoids saddle points and converges to local minima in nonconvex problems. However, similar guarantees are lacking for distributed first-order algorithms. The…
This paper presents an algorithm to solve the Soft k-Means problem globally. Unlike Fuzzy c-Means, Soft k-Means (SkM) has a matrix factorization-type objective and has been shown to have a close relation with the popular probability…
The k-core of a graph is its maximal subgraph with minimum degree at least k, and the core value of a vertex u is the largest k for which u is contained in the k-core of the graph. Among cohesive subgraphs, k-core and its variants have…
We study the quadratic $k$-vertex-disjoint paths problem (Q-$k$-VDP), which seeks $k$ vertex-disjoint paths in a directed graph that minimize a nonconvex quadratic objective function. We formulate the problem as a binary quadratic program…
In recent years it was proved that simple modifications of the classical Frank-Wolfe algorithm (aka conditional gradient algorithm) for smooth convex minimization over convex and compact polytopes, converge with linear rate, assuming the…
Sensor networks play a critical role in many situational awareness applications. In this paper, we study the problem of determining sensor placements to balance coverage and connectivity objectives over a target region. Leveraging algebraic…
Decentralized optimization is critical for solving large-scale machine learning problems over distributed networks, where multiple nodes collaborate through local communication. In practice, the variances of stochastic gradient estimators…
Identifying clusters of similar objects in data plays a significant role in a wide range of applications. As a model problem for clustering, we consider the densest k-disjoint-clique problem, whose goal is to identify the collection of k…
We study the consistent k-center clustering problem. In this problem, the goal is to maintain a constant factor approximate $k$-center solution during a sequence of $n$ point insertions and deletions while minimizing the recourse, i.e., the…
The maximum k-plex problem is a computationally complex problem, which emerged from graph-theoretic social network studies. This paper presents an effective hybrid local search for solving the maximum k-plex problem that combines the…
We consider smooth convex minimization over compact convex sets, i.e., $\min_{x \in C} f(x)$ with the (vanilla) Frank-Wolfe algorithm. Well-known lower bounds establish a worst-case $\Omega(1/t)$ primal-gap barrier in the general smooth…
Motivated by a class of applied problems arising from physical layer based security in a digital communication system, in particular, by a secrecy sum-rate maximization problem, this paper studies a nonsmooth, difference-of-convex (dc)…
Graph-based variational methods have recently shown to be highly competitive for various classification problems of high-dimensional data, but are inherently difficult to handle from an optimization perspective. This paper proposes a convex…
We consider the problem of finding critical points of functions that are non-convex and non-smooth. Studying a fairly broad class of such problems, we analyze the behavior of three gradient-based methods (gradient descent, proximal update,…