The Combinatorial Brain Surgeon: Pruning Weights That Cancel One Another in Neural Networks

Neural networks tend to achieve better accuracy with training if they are larger — even if the resulting models are overparameterized. Nevertheless, carefully removing such excess parameters before, during, or after training may also produce models with similar or even improved accuracy. In many cases, that can be curiously achieved by heuristics as simple as … Read more

Mixed-Integer Programming Techniques for the Minimum Sum-of-Squares Clustering Problem

The minimum sum-of-squares clustering problem is a very important problem in data mining and machine learning with very many applications in, e.g., medicine or social sciences. However, it is known to be NP-hard in all relevant cases and to be notoriously hard to be solved to global optimality in practice. In this paper, we develop … Read more

Stable Recovery of Sparse Signals With Non-convex Weighted $r$-Norm Minus $1$-Norm

Given the measurement matrix $A$ and the observation signal $y$, the central purpose of compressed sensing is to find the most sparse solution of the underdetermined linear system $y=Ax+z$, where $x$ is the $s$-sparse signal to be recovered and $z$ is the noise vector. Zhou and Yu \cite{Zhou and Yu 2019} recently proposed a novel … Read more

Time-series aggregation for the optimization of energy systems: goals, challenges, approaches, and opportunities

The rising significance of renewable energy increases the importance of representing time-varying input data in energy system optimization studies. Time-series aggregation, which reduces temporal model complexity, has emerged in recent years to address this challenge. We provide a comprehensive review of time-series aggregation for the optimization of energy systems. We show where time series affect … Read more

New interior-point approach for one- and two-class linear support vector machines using multiple variable splitting

Multiple variable splitting is a general technique for decomposing problems by using copies of variables and additional linking constraints that equate their values. The resulting large optimization problem can be solved with a specialized interior-point method that exploits the problem structure and computes the Newton direction with a combination of direct and iterative solvers (i.e., … Read more

Analysis non-sparse recovery for non-convex relaxed $\ell_q$ minimization

This paper studies construction of signals, which are sparse or nearly sparse with respect to a tight frame $D$ from underdetermined linear systems. In the paper, we propose a non-convex relaxed $\ell_q(0 ArticleDownload View PDF

Mixed-Integer Optimization with Constraint Learning

We establish a broad methodological foundation for mixed-integer optimization with learned constraints. We propose an end-to-end pipeline for data-driven decision making in which constraints and objectives are directly learned from data using machine learning, and the trained models are embedded in an optimization formulation. We exploit the mixed-integer optimization-representability of many machine learning methods, including … Read more

Inexact bilevel stochastic gradient methods for constrained and unconstrained lower-level problems

Two-level stochastic optimization formulations have become instrumental in a number ofmachine learning contexts such as continual learning, neural architecture search, adversariallearning, and hyperparameter tuning. Practical stochastic bilevel optimization problemsbecome challenging in optimization or learning scenarios where the number of variables ishigh or there are constraints. In this paper, we introduce a bilevel stochastic gradient method … Read more

Sparse Plus Low Rank Matrix Decomposition: A Discrete Optimization Approach

We study the Sparse Plus Low-Rank decomposition problem (SLR), which is the problem of decomposing a corrupted data matrix into a sparse matrix of perturbations plus a low-rank matrix containing the ground truth. SLR is a fundamental problem in Operations Research and Machine Learning which arises in various applications, including data compression, latent semantic indexing, … Read more