Related papers: Testing Approximate Stationarity Concepts for Piec…
Numerical solutions of differential equations are usually not smooth functions. However, they should resemble the smoothness of the corresponding real solutions in one way or another. In two of our recent papers, a kind of spacial…
Tame functions are a class of nonsmooth, nonconvex functions, which feature in a wide range of applications: functions encountered in the training of deep neural networks with all common activations, value functions of mixed-integer…
Several decades ago the Proximal Point Algorithm (PPA) started to gain a long-lasting attraction for both abstract operator theory and numerical optimization communities. Even in modern applications, researchers still use proximal…
Several properties of stationary subdivision schemes are nowadays well understood. In particular, it is known that the polynomial generation and reproduction capability of a stationary subdivision scheme is strongly connected with sum…
Let us assume that $f$ is a continuous function defined on the unit ball of $\mathbb R^d$, of the form $f(x) = g (A x)$, where $A$ is a $k \times d$ matrix and $g$ is a function of $k$ variables for $k \ll d$. We are given a budget $m \in…
This paper presents smoothing schemes for obtaining approximate stationary points of unconstrained or linearly-constrained composite nonconvex-concave min-max (and hence nonsmooth) problems by applying well-known algorithms to composite…
We give a highly efficient "semi-agnostic" algorithm for learning univariate probability distributions that are well approximated by piecewise polynomial density functions. Let $p$ be an arbitrary distribution over an interval $I$ which is…
Testing whether a set $\mathbf{f}$ of polynomials has an algebraic dependence is a basic problem with several applications. The polynomials are given as algebraic circuits. Algebraic independence testing question is wide open over finite…
We consider in this paper a class of single-ratio fractional minimization problems, in which the numerator part of the objective is the sum of a nonsmooth nonconvex function and a smooth nonconvex function while the denominator part is a…
Sequential testing problems involve a complex system with several components, each of which is "working" with some independent probability. The outcome of each component can be determined by performing a test, which incurs some cost. The…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
Based on the needs of convergence proofs of preconditioned proximal point methods, we introduce notions of partial strong submonotonicity and partial (metric) subregularity of set-valued maps. We study relationships between these two…
Motivated by a growing list of nontraditional statistical estimation problems of the piecewise kind, this paper provides a survey of known results supplemented with new results for the class of piecewise linear-quadratic programs. These are…
We introduce the concept of sos-convex Lyapunov functions for stability analysis of both linear and nonlinear difference inclusions (also known as discrete-time switched systems). These are polynomial Lyapunov functions that have an…
This paper presents an efficient approach to image segmentation that approximates the piecewise-smooth (PS) functional in [12] with explicit solutions. By rendering some rational constraints on the initial conditions and the final solutions…
Let $\cal{P}$ be an affine invariant property of functions $\mathbb{F}_p^n \to [R]$ for fixed $p$ and $R$. We show that if $\cal{P}$ is locally testable with a constant number of queries, then one can estimate the distance of a function $f$…
We consider strongly-convex-strongly-concave saddle-point problems with general non-bilinear objective and different condition numbers with respect to the primal and the dual variables. First, we consider such problems with smooth composite…
We propose to approximate a (possibly discontinuous) multivariate function f (x) on a compact set by the partial minimizer arg miny p(x, y) of an appropriate polynomial p whose construction can be cast in a univariate sum of squares (SOS)…
Stationary points or derivative zero crossings of a regression function correspond to points where a trend reverses, making their estimation scientifically important. Existing approaches to uncertainty quantification for stationary points…
We study the general integer programming (IP) problem of optimizing a separable convex function over the integer points of a polytope: $\min \{f(\mathbf{x}) \mid A\mathbf{x} = \mathbf{b}, \, \mathbf{l} \leq \mathbf{x} \leq \mathbf{u}, \,…