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

An acceleration procedure for optimal first-order methods

We introduce in this paper an optimal first-order method that allows an easy and cheap evaluation of the local Lipschitz constant of the objective’s gradient. This constant must ideally be chosen at every iteration as small as possible, while serving in an indispensable upper bound for the value of the objective function. In the previously … Read more

A variable smoothing algorithm for solving convex optimization problems

In this article we propose a method for solving unconstrained optimization problems with convex and Lipschitz continuous objective functions. By making use of the Moreau envelopes of the functions occurring in the objective, we smooth the latter to a convex and differentiable function with Lipschitz continuous gradient by using both variable and constant smoothing parameters. … Read more

A primal-dual splitting algorithm for finding zeros of sums of maximally monotone operators

We consider the primal problem of finding the zeros of the sum of a maximally monotone operator with the composition of another maximally monotone operator with a linear continuous operator and a corresponding dual problem formulated by means of the inverse operators. A primal-dual splitting algorithm which simultaneously solves the two problems in finite-dimensional spaces … Read more

A quasi-Newton proximal splitting method

A new result in convex analysis on the calculation of proximity operators in certain scaled norms is derived. We describe efficient implementations of the proximity calculation for a useful class of functions; the implementations exploit the piece-wise linear nature of the dual problem. The second part of the paper applies the previous result to acceleration … Read more

Optimal Stochastic Approximation Algorithms for Strongly Convex Stochastic Composite Optimization, II: Shrinking Procedures and Optimal Algorithms

In this paper we study new stochastic approximation (SA) type algorithms, namely, the accelerated SA (AC-SA), for solving strongly convex stochastic composite optimization (SCO) problems. Specifically, by introducing a domain shrinking procedure, we significantly improve the large-deviation results associated with the convergence rate of a nearly optimal AC-SA algorithm presented by the authors. Moreover, we … Read more

Newton-Like Methods for Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation

We propose two classes of second-order optimization methods for solving the sparse inverse covariance estimation problem. The first approach, which we call the Newton-LASSO method, minimizes a piecewise quadratic model of the objective function at every iteration to generate a step. We employ the fast iterative shrinkage thresholding method (FISTA) to solve this subproblem. The … Read more

Greedy approximation in convex optimization

We study sparse approximate solutions to convex optimization problems. It is known that in many engineering applications researchers are interested in an approximate solution of an optimization problem as a linear combination of elements from a given system of elements. There is an increasing interest in building such sparse approximate solutions using different greedy-type algorithms. … Read more