Techniques in Iterative Proton CT Image Reconstruction

This is a review paper on some of the physics, modeling, and iterative algorithms in proton computed tomography (pCT) image reconstruction. The primary challenge in pCT image reconstruction lies in the degraded spatial resolution resulting from multiple Coulomb scattering within the imaged object. Analytical models such as the most likely path (MLP) have been proposed … Read more

An accelerated non-Euclidean hybrid proximal extragradient-type Algorithm for convex-concave saddle-point Problems

This paper describes an accelerated HPE-type method based on general Bregman distances for solving monotone saddle-point (SP) problems. The algorithm is a special instance of a non-Euclidean hybrid proximal extragradient framework introduced by Svaiter and Solodov [28] where the prox sub-inclusions are solved using an accelerated gradient method. It generalizes the accelerated HPE algorithm presented … Read more

New Computational Guarantees for Solving Convex Optimization Problems with First Order Methods, via a Function Growth Condition Measure

Motivated by recent work of Renegar, we present new computational methods and associated computational guarantees for solving convex optimization problems using first-order methods. Our problem of interest is the general convex optimization problem f^* = \min_{x \in Q} f(x), where we presume knowledge of a strict lower bound f_slb < f^*. [Indeed, f_slb is naturally ... Read more

Noisy Euclidean distance realization: robust facial reduction and the Pareto frontier

We present two algorithms for large-scale low-rank Euclidean distance matrix completion problems, based on semidefinite optimization. Our first method works by relating cliques in the graph of the known distances to faces of the positive semidefinite cone, yielding a combinatorial procedure that is provably robust and parallelizable. Our second algorithm is a first order method … Read more

Uniqueness of Market Equilibrium on a Network: A Peak-Load Pricing Approach

In this paper we establish conditions under which uniqueness of market equilibrium is obtained in a setup where prior to trading of electricity, transmission capacities between different market regions are fixed. In our setup, firms facing fluctuating demand decide on the size and location of production facilities. They make production decisions constrained by the invested … Read more

Inertial Proximal ADMM for Linearly Constrained Separable Convex Optimization

The \emph{alternating direction method of multipliers} (ADMM) is a popular and efficient first-order method that has recently found numerous applications, and the proximal ADMM is an important variant of it. The main contributions of this paper are the proposition and the analysis of a class of inertial proximal ADMMs, which unify the basic ideas of … Read more

A general inertial proximal point algorithm for mixed variational inequality problem

In this paper, we first propose a general inertial \emph{proximal point algorithm} (PPA) for the mixed \emph{variational inequality} (VI) problem. Based on our knowledge, without stronger assumptions, convergence rate result is not known in the literature for inertial type PPAs. Under certain conditions, we are able to establish the global convergence and nonasymptotic $O(1/k)$ convergence … Read more

Low-rank spectral optimization

Various applications in signal processing and machine learning give rise to highly structured spectral optimization problems characterized by low-rank solutions. Two important examples that motivate this work are optimization problems from phase retrieval and from blind deconvolution, which are designed to yield rank-1 solutions. An algorithm is described based solving a certain constrained eigenvalue optimization … Read more

On the Convergence of Multi-Block Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers and Block Coordinate Descent Method

The paper answers several open questions of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and the block coordinate descent (BCD) method that are now wildly used to solve large scale convex optimization problems in many fields. For ADMM, it is still lack of theoretical understanding of the algorithm when the objective function is not separable … Read more

A survey on operator splitting and decomposition of convex programs

Many structured convex minimization problems can be modeled by the search of a zero of the sum of two monotone operators. Operator splitting methods have been designed to decompose and regularize at the same time these kind of models. We review here these models and the classical splitting methods. We focus on the numerical sensitivity … Read more