On the Global and Linear Convergence of the Generalized Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers

The formulation min f(x)+g(y) subject to Ax+By=b, where f and g are extended-value convex functions, arises in many application areas such as signal processing, imaging and image processing, statistics, and machine learning either naturally or after variable splitting. In many common problems, one of the two objective functions is strictly convex and has Lipschitz continuous … Read more

A Newton’s method for the continuous quadratic knapsack problem

We introduce a new efficient method to solve the continuous quadratic knapsack problem. This is a highly structured quadratic program that appears in different contexts. The method converges after O(n) iterations with overall arithmetic complexity O(n²). Numerical experiments show that in practice the method converges in a small number of iterations with overall linear complexity, … Read more

Learning Circulant Sensing Kernels

In signal acquisition, Toeplitz and circulant matrices are widely used as sensing operators. They correspond to discrete convolutions and are easily or even naturally realized in various applications. For compressive sensing, recent work has used random Toeplitz and circulant sensing matrices and proved their efficiency in theory, by computer simulations, as well as through physical … Read more

An Efficient Augmented Lagrangian Method with Applications to Total Variation Minimization

Based on the classic augmented Lagrangian multiplier method, we propose, analyze and test an algorithm for solving a class of equality-constrained non-smooth optimization problems (chiefly but not necessarily convex programs) with a particular structure. The algorithm effectively combines an alternating direction technique with a nonmonotone line search to minimize the augmented Lagrangian function at each … Read more

Convex computation of the region of attraction of polynomial control systems

We address the long-standing problem of computing the region of attraction (ROA) of a target set (typically a neighborhood of an equilibrium point) of a controlled nonlinear system with polynomial dynamics and semialgebraic state and input constraints. We show that the ROA can be computed by solving a convex linear programming (LP) problem over the … Read more

Bounds on Eigenvalues of Matrices Arising from Interior-Point Methods

Interior-point methods feature prominently among numerical methods for inequality-constrained optimization problems, and involve the need to solve a sequence of linear systems that typically become increasingly ill-conditioned with the iterations. To solve these systems, whose original form has a nonsymmetric 3×3 block structure, it is common practice to perform block Gaussian elimination and either solve … Read more

An adaptive accelerated first-order method for convex optimization

This paper presents a new accelerated variant of Nesterov’s method for solving composite convex optimization problems in which certain acceleration parameters are adaptively (and aggressively) chosen so as to substantially improve its practical performance compared to existing accelerated variants while at the same time preserve the optimal iteration-complexity shared by these methods. Computational results are … Read more

A QCQP Approach to Triangulation

Triangulation of a three-dimensional point from $n\ge 2$ two-dimensional images can be formulated as a quadratically constrained quadratic program. We propose an algorithm to extract candidate solutions to this problem from its semidefinite programming relaxations. We then describe a sufficient condition and a polynomial time test for certifying when such a solution is optimal. This … Read more

Stochastic optimization and sparse statistical recovery: An optimal algorithm for high dimensions

We develop and analyze stochastic optimization algorithms for problems in which the expected loss is strongly convex, and the optimum is (approximately) sparse. Previous approaches are able to exploit only one of these two structures, yielding an $\order(\pdim/T)$ convergence rate for strongly convex objectives in $\pdim$ dimensions, and an $\order(\sqrt{(\spindex \log \pdim)/T})$ convergence rate when … Read more