The block mutual coherence property condition for signal recovery

Compressed sensing shows that a sparse signal can stably be recovered from incomplete linear measurements. But, in practical applications, some signals have additional structure, where the nonzero elements arise in some blocks. We call such signals as block-sparse signals. In this paper, the $\ell_2/\ell_1-\alpha\ell_2$ minimization method for the stable recovery of block-sparse signals is investigated. … Read more

Behavior of Limited Memory BFGS when Applied to Nonsmooth Functions and their Nesterov Smoothings

The motivation to study the behavior of limited-memory BFGS (L-BFGS) on nonsmooth optimization problems is based on two empirical observations: the widespread success of L-BFGS in solving large-scale smooth optimization problems, and the remarkable effectiveness of the full BFGS method in solving small to medium-sized nonsmooth optimization problems, based on using a gradient, not a … Read more

Manifold Identification for Ultimately Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization

This work proposes a progressive manifold identification approach for distributed optimization with sound theoretical justifications to greatly reduce both the rounds of communication and the bytes communicated per round for partly-smooth regularized problems such as the $\ell_1$- and group-LASSO-regularized ones. Our two-stage method first uses an inexact proximal quasi-Newton method to iteratively identify a sequence … Read more

Gradient Sampling Methods with Inexact Subproblem Solves and Gradient Aggregation

Gradient sampling (GS) has proved to be an effective methodology for the minimization of objective functions that may be nonconvex and/or nonsmooth. The most computationally expensive component of a contemporary GS method is the need to solve a convex quadratic subproblem in each iteration. In this paper, a strategy is proposed that allows the use … Read more

Decomposition Algorithms for Some Deterministic and Two-Stage Stochastic Single-Leader Multi-Follower Games

We consider a certain class of hierarchical decision problems that can be viewed as single-leader multi-follower games, and be represented by a virtual market coordinator trying to set a price system for traded goods, according to some criterion that balances supply and demand. The objective function of the market coordinator involves the decisions of many … Read more

Stochastic Variance-Reduced Prox-Linear Algorithms for Nonconvex Composite Optimization

We consider minimization of composite functions of the form $f(g(x))+h(x)$, where $f$ and $h$ are convex functions (which can be nonsmooth) and $g$ is a smooth vector mapping. In addition, we assume that $g$ is the average of finite number of component mappings or the expectation over a family of random component mappings. We propose … Read more

Openness, Holder metric regularity and Holder continuity properties of semialgebraic set-valued maps

Given a semialgebraic set-valued map $F \colon \mathbb{R}^n \rightrightarrows \mathbb{R}^m$ with closed graph, we show that the map $F$ is Holder metrically subregular and that the following conditions are equivalent: (i) $F$ is an open map from its domain into its range and the range of $F$ is locally closed; (ii) the map $F$ is … Read more

Revisiting Augmented Lagrangian Duals

For nonconvex optimization problems, possibly having mixed-integer variables, a convergent primal-dual solution algorithm is proposed. The approach applies a proximal bundle method to certain augmented Lagrangian dual that arises in the context of the so-called generalized augmented Lagrangians. We recast these Lagrangians into the framework of a classical Lagrangian, by means of a special reformulation … Read more

Variable Smoothing for Weakly Convex Composite Functions

We study minimization of a structured objective function, being the sum of a smooth function and a composition of a weakly convex function with a linear operator. Applications include image reconstruction problems with regularizers that introduce less bias than the standard convex regularizers. We develop a variable smoothing algorithm, based on the Moreau envelope with … Read more

Geometry of First-Order Methods and Adaptive Acceleration

First-order operator splitting methods are ubiquitous among many fields through science and engineering, such as inverse problems, signal/image processing, statistics, data science and machine learning, to name a few. In this paper, we study a geometric property of first-order methods when applying to solve non-smooth optimization problems. With the tool of “partial smoothness”, we design … Read more