On the regularizing behavior of recent gradient methods in the solution of linear ill-posed problems

We analyze the regularization properties of two recently proposed gradient methods applied to discrete linear inverse problems. By studying their filter factors, we show that the tendency of these methods to eliminate first the eigencomponents of the gradient corresponding to large singular values allows to reconstruct the most significant part of the solution, thus yielding … Read more

Exact duality in semidefinite programming based on elementary reformulations

In semidefinite programming (SDP), unlike in linear programming, Farkas’ lemma may fail to prove infeasibility. Here we obtain an exact, short certificate of infeasibility in SDP by an elementary approach: we reformulate any equality constrained semidefinite system using only elementary row operations, and rotations. When the system is infeasible, the infeasibility of the reformulated system … Read more

An Efficient Gauss-Newton Algorithm for Symmetric Low-Rank Product Matrix Approximations

We derive and study a Gauss-Newton method for computing a symmetric low-rank product that is the closest to a given symmetric matrix in Frobenius norm. Our Gauss-Newton method, which has a particularly simple form, shares the same order of iteration-complexity as a gradient method when the size of desired eigenspace is small, but can be … Read more

A Quasi-Newton Algorithm for Nonconvex, Nonsmooth Optimization with Global Convergence Guarantees

A line search algorithm for minimizing nonconvex and/or nonsmooth objective functions is presented. The algorithm is a hybrid between a standard Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno (BFGS) and an adaptive gradient sampling (GS) method. The BFGS strategy is employed because it typically yields fast convergence to the vicinity of a stationary point, and together with the adaptive GS strategy … Read more

A proximal multiplier method for separable convex minimization

In this paper, we propose an inexact proximal multiplier method using proximal distances for solving convex minimization problems with a separable structure. The proposed method unified the work of Chen and Teboulle (PCPM method), Kyono and Fukushima (NPCPMM) and Auslender and Teboulle (EPDM) and extends the convergence properties for a class of phi-divergence distances. We … Read more

Strict Fejér Monotonicity by Superiorization of Feasibility-Seeking Projection Methods

We consider the superiorization methodology, which can be thought of as lying between feasibility-seeking and constrained minimization. It is not quite trying to solve the full fledged constrained minimization problem; rather, the task is to find a feasible point which is superior (with respect to the objective function value) to one returned by a feasibility-seeking … Read more

Linear equalities in blackbox optimization

The Mesh Adaptive Direct Search (Mads) algorithm is designed for blackbox optimization problems subject to general inequality constraints. Currently, Mads does not support equalities, neither in theory nor in practice. The present work proposes extensions to treat problems with linear equalities whose expression is known. The main idea consists in reformulating the optimization problem into … Read more

A Second-Order Method for Compressed Sensing Problems with Coherent and Redundant Dictionaries

In this paper we are interested in the solution of Compressed Sensing (CS) problems where the signals to be recovered are sparse in coherent and redundant dictionaries. CS problems of this type are convex with non-smooth and non-separable regularization term, therefore a specialized solver is required. We propose a primal-dual Newton Conjugate Gradients (pdNCG) method. … Read more

Spectral estimates for unreduced symmetric KKT systems arising from Interior Point methods

We consider symmetrized KKT systems arising in the solution of convex quadratic programming problems in standard form by Interior Point methods. Their coefficient matrices usually have 3×3 block structure and, under suitable conditions on both the quadratic programming problem and the solution, they are nonsingular in the limit. We present new spectral estimates for these … Read more

Zero-Convex Functions, Perturbation Resilience, and Subgradient Projections for Feasibility-Seeking Methods

The convex feasibility problem (CFP) is at the core of the modeling of many problems in various areas of science. Subgradient projection methods are important tools for solving the CFP because they enable the use of subgradient calculations instead of orthogonal projections onto the individual sets of the problem. Working in a real Hilbert space, … Read more