We present a new algorithm, called manifold sampling, for the unconstrained minimization of a nonsmooth composite function $h\circ F$ when $h$ has known structure. In particular, by classifying points in the domain of the nonsmooth function $h$ into manifolds, we adapt search directions within a trust-region framework based on knowledge of manifolds intersecting the current … Read more
We consider the problem of minimizing a Lipschitz differentiable function over a class of sparse symmetric sets that has wide applications in engineering and science. For this problem, it is known that any accumulation point of the classical projected gradient (PG) method with a constant stepsize $1/L$ satisfies the $L$-stationarity optimality condition that was introduced … Read more
As shown in [9, 1], signals whose wavelet coefficients exhibit a rooted tree structure can be recovered — using specially-adapted compressed sensing algorithms — from just $n=\mathcal{O}(k)$ measurements, where $k$ is the sparsity of the signal. Motivated by these results, we introduce a simplified proportional-dimensional asymptotic framework which enables the quantitative evaluation of recovery guarantees … Read more
We study the problem of constructing minimum power-$p$ Euclidean $k$-Steiner trees in the plane. The problem is to find a tree of minimum cost spanning a set of given terminals where, as opposed to the minimum spanning tree problem, at most $k$ additional nodes (Steiner points) may be introduced anywhere in the plane. The cost … Read more
We propose a framework for sensitivity analysis of linear programs (LPs) in minimiza- tion form, allowing for simultaneous perturbations in the objective coefficients and right-hand sides, where the perturbations are modeled in a compact, convex uncertainty set. This framework unifies and extends multiple approaches for LP sensitivity analysis in the literature and has close ties … Read more
A new method is proposed for solving optimization problems with equality constraints and bounds on the variables. In the spirit of Sequential Quadratic Programming and Sequential Linearly-Constrained Programming, the new method approximately solves, at each iteration, an equality-constrained optimization problem. The bound constraints are handled in outer iterations by means of an Augmented Lagrangian scheme. … Read more
Using an augmented Lagrangian matrix approach, we analytically solve in this paper a broad class of linear systems that includes symmetric and nonsymmetric problems in saddle point form. To this end, some mild assumptions are made and a preconditioning is specially designed to improve the sensitivity of the systems before the calculation of their solutions. … Read more
We consider distributed optimization problems where networked nodes cooperatively minimize the sum of their locally known convex costs. A popular class of methods to solve these problems are the distributed gradient methods, which are attractive due to their inexpensive iterations, but have a drawback of slow convergence rates. This motivates the incorporation of second-order information … Read more
In this paper, driven by Behavioral applications to human dynamics, we consider the characterization of completeness in pseudo-quasimetric spaces in term of a generalization of Ekeland’s variational principle in such spaces, and provide examples illustrating significant improvements to some previously obtained results, even in complete metric spaces. At the behavioral level, we show that the … Read more
In this paper, we present a generic framework to extend existing uniformly optimal convex programming algorithms to solve more general nonlinear, possibly nonconvex, optimization problems. The basic idea is to incorporate a local search step (gradient descent or Quasi-Newton iteration) into these uniformly optimal convex programming methods, and then enforce a monotone decreasing property of … Read more