973 research outputs found
Worst-Case Linear Discriminant Analysis as Scalable Semidefinite Feasibility Problems
In this paper, we propose an efficient semidefinite programming (SDP)
approach to worst-case linear discriminant analysis (WLDA). Compared with the
traditional LDA, WLDA considers the dimensionality reduction problem from the
worst-case viewpoint, which is in general more robust for classification.
However, the original problem of WLDA is non-convex and difficult to optimize.
In this paper, we reformulate the optimization problem of WLDA into a sequence
of semidefinite feasibility problems. To efficiently solve the semidefinite
feasibility problems, we design a new scalable optimization method with
quasi-Newton methods and eigen-decomposition being the core components. The
proposed method is orders of magnitude faster than standard interior-point
based SDP solvers.
Experiments on a variety of classification problems demonstrate that our
approach achieves better performance than standard LDA. Our method is also much
faster and more scalable than standard interior-point SDP solvers based WLDA.
The computational complexity for an SDP with constraints and matrices of
size by is roughly reduced from to
( in our case).Comment: 14 page
Efficient Semidefinite Branch-and-Cut for MAP-MRF Inference
We propose a Branch-and-Cut (B&C) method for solving general MAP-MRF
inference problems. The core of our method is a very efficient bounding
procedure, which combines scalable semidefinite programming (SDP) and a
cutting-plane method for seeking violated constraints. In order to further
speed up the computation, several strategies have been exploited, including
model reduction, warm start and removal of inactive constraints.
We analyze the performance of the proposed method under different settings,
and demonstrate that our method either outperforms or performs on par with
state-of-the-art approaches. Especially when the connectivities are dense or
when the relative magnitudes of the unary costs are low, we achieve the best
reported results. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves better
approximation than the state-of-the-art methods within a variety of time
budgets on challenging non-submodular MAP-MRF inference problems.Comment: 21 page
Large-scale Binary Quadratic Optimization Using Semidefinite Relaxation and Applications
In computer vision, many problems such as image segmentation, pixel
labelling, and scene parsing can be formulated as binary quadratic programs
(BQPs). For submodular problems, cuts based methods can be employed to
efficiently solve large-scale problems. However, general nonsubmodular problems
are significantly more challenging to solve. Finding a solution when the
problem is of large size to be of practical interest, however, typically
requires relaxation. Two standard relaxation methods are widely used for
solving general BQPs--spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each
with their own advantages and disadvantages. Spectral relaxation is simple and
easy to implement, but its bound is loose. Semidefinite relaxation has a
tighter bound, but its computational complexity is high, especially for large
scale problems. In this work, we present a new SDP formulation for BQPs, with
two desirable properties. First, it has a similar relaxation bound to
conventional SDP formulations. Second, compared with conventional SDP methods,
the new SDP formulation leads to a significantly more efficient and scalable
dual optimization approach, which has the same degree of complexity as spectral
methods. We then propose two solvers, namely, quasi-Newton and smoothing Newton
methods, for the dual problem. Both of them are significantly more efficiently
than standard interior-point methods. In practice, the smoothing Newton solver
is faster than the quasi-Newton solver for dense or medium-sized problems,
while the quasi-Newton solver is preferable for large sparse/structured
problems. Our experiments on a few computer vision applications including
clustering, image segmentation, co-segmentation and registration show the
potential of our SDP formulation for solving large-scale BQPs.Comment: Fixed some typos. 18 pages. Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligenc
Submodular relaxation for inference in Markov random fields
In this paper we address the problem of finding the most probable state of a
discrete Markov random field (MRF), also known as the MRF energy minimization
problem. The task is known to be NP-hard in general and its practical
importance motivates numerous approximate algorithms. We propose a submodular
relaxation approach (SMR) based on a Lagrangian relaxation of the initial
problem. Unlike the dual decomposition approach of Komodakis et al., 2011 SMR
does not decompose the graph structure of the initial problem but constructs a
submodular energy that is minimized within the Lagrangian relaxation. Our
approach is applicable to both pairwise and high-order MRFs and allows to take
into account global potentials of certain types. We study theoretical
properties of the proposed approach and evaluate it experimentally.Comment: This paper is accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on
Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligenc
A Fast Interior Point Method for Atomic Norm Soft Thresholding
The atomic norm provides a generalization of the -norm to continuous
parameter spaces. When applied as a sparse regularizer for line spectral
estimation the solution can be obtained by solving a convex optimization
problem. This problem is known as atomic norm soft thresholding (AST). It can
be cast as a semidefinite program and solved by standard methods. In the
semidefinite formulation there are dual variables which complicates
the implementation of a standard primal-dual interior-point method based on
symmetric cones. That has lead researcher to consider alternating direction
method of multipliers (ADMM) for the solution of AST, but this method is still
somewhat slow for large problem sizes. To obtain a faster algorithm we
reformulate AST as a non-symmetric conic program. That has two properties of
key importance to its numerical solution: the conic formulation has only
dual variables and the Toeplitz structure inherent to AST is preserved. Based
on it we derive FastAST which is a primal-dual interior point method for
solving AST. Two variants are considered with the fastest one requiring only
flops per iteration. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that
FastAST solves AST significantly faster than a state-of-the-art solver based on
ADMM.Comment: 31 pages, accepted for publication in Elsevier Signal Processin
A Simple and Efficient Algorithm for Nonlinear Model Predictive Control
We present PANOC, a new algorithm for solving optimal control problems
arising in nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC). A usual approach to this
type of problems is sequential quadratic programming (SQP), which requires the
solution of a quadratic program at every iteration and, consequently, inner
iterative procedures. As a result, when the problem is ill-conditioned or the
prediction horizon is large, each outer iteration becomes computationally very
expensive. We propose a line-search algorithm that combines forward-backward
iterations (FB) and Newton-type steps over the recently introduced
forward-backward envelope (FBE), a continuous, real-valued, exact merit
function for the original problem. The curvature information of Newton-type
methods enables asymptotic superlinear rates under mild assumptions at the
limit point, and the proposed algorithm is based on very simple operations:
access to first-order information of the cost and dynamics and low-cost direct
linear algebra. No inner iterative procedure nor Hessian evaluation is
required, making our approach computationally simpler than SQP methods. The
low-memory requirements and simple implementation make our method particularly
suited for embedded NMPC applications
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