Building upon multigrid methods, the framework of multilevel optimization methods was developed to solve structured optimization problems, including problems in optimal control, image processing, etc. In this paper, we give a broader view of the multilevel framework and establish some connections between multilevel algorithms and the other approaches. An interesting case of the so called … Read more
Empirical risk minimization (ERM) is recognized as a special form in standard convex optimization. When using a first order method, the Lipschitz constant of the empirical risk plays a crucial role in the convergence analysis and stepsize strategies for these problems. We derive the probabilistic bounds for such Lipschitz constants using random matrix theory. We … Read more
In this paper, we develop a novel {\bf ho}moto{\bf p}y {\bf s}moothing (HOPS) algorithm for solving a family of non-smooth problems that is composed of a non-smooth term with an explicit max-structure and a smooth term or a simple non-smooth term whose proximal mapping is easy to compute. The best known iteration complexity for solving … Read more
The Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) has been proved to be effective for solving separable convex optimization subject to linear constraints. In this paper, we propose a Generalized Symmetric ADMM (GS-ADMM), which updates the Lagrange multiplier twice with suitable stepsizes, to solve the multi-block separable convex programming. This GS-ADMM partitions the data into two … Read more
In this paper we propose a primal-dual homotopy method for $\ell_1$-minimization problems with infinity norm constraints in the context of sparse reconstruction. The natural homotopy parameter is the value of the bound for the constraints and we show that there exists a piecewise linear solution path with finitely many break points for the primal problem … Read more
The usual approach to developing and analyzing first-order methods for smooth convex optimization assumes that the gradient of the objective function is uniformly smooth with some Lipschitz constant L. However, in many settings the differentiable convex function f(.) is not uniformly smooth — for example in D-optimal design where f(x):=-ln det(HXH^T), or even the univariate … Read more
We use moment methods to construct a converging hierarchy of optimization problems to lower bound the ground state energy of interacting particle systems. We approximate the infinite dimensional optimization problems in this hierarchy by block diagonal semidefinite programs. For this we develop the necessary harmonic analysis for spaces consisting of subsets of another space, and … Read more
The paper studies the solution of stochastic optimization problems in which approximations to the gradient and Hessian are obtained through subsampling. We first consider Newton-like methods that employ these approximations and discuss how to coordinate the accuracy in the gradient and Hessian to yield a superlinear rate of convergence in expectation. The second part of … Read more
Let K be a closed convex cone with dual K-star in a finite-dimensional real Hilbert space V. A positive operator on K is a linear operator L on V such that L(K) is a subset of K. Positive operators generalize the nonnegative matrices and are essential to the Perron-Frobenius theory. We say that L is … Read more
This paper studies the matrix completion problem under arbitrary sampling schemes. We propose a new estimator incorporating both max-norm and nuclear-norm regularization, based on which we can conduct efficient low-rank matrix recovery using a random subset of entries observed with additive noise under general non-uniform and unknown sampling distributions. This method significantly relaxes the uniform … Read more