Playing with Duality: An Overview of Recent Primal-Dual Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Optimization Problems

Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically simplify its solution. Deriving efficient strategies which jointly brings into play the primal and the dual problems is however a more recent idea which has generated many important new contributions in the last years. These novel developments are grounded on recent advances in convex analysis, discrete optimization, parallel processing, and non-smooth optimization with emphasis on sparsity issues. In this paper, we aim at presenting the principles of primal-dual approaches, while giving an overview of numerical methods which have been proposed in different contexts. We show the benefits which can be drawn from primal-dual algorithms both for solving large-scale convex optimization problems and discrete ones, and we provide various application examples to illustrate their usefulness

Bias-Reduction in Variational Regularization

The aim of this paper is to introduce and study a two-step debiasing method for variational regularization. After solving the standard variational problem, the key idea is to add a consecutive debiasing step minimizing the data fidelity on an appropriate set, the so-called model manifold. The latter is defined by Bregman distances or infimal convolutions thereof, using the (uniquely defined) subgradient appearing in the optimality condition of the variational method. For particular settings, such as anisotropic $\ell^1$ and TV-type regularization, previously used debiasing techniques are shown to be special cases. The proposed approach is however easily applicable to a wider range of regularizations. The two-step debiasing is shown to be well-defined and to optimally reduce bias in a certain setting. In addition to visual and PSNR-based evaluations, different notions of bias and variance decompositions are investigated in numerical studies. The improvements offered by the proposed scheme are demonstrated and its performance is shown to be comparable to optimal results obtained with Bregman iterations.Comment: Accepted by JMI

Optimization with Sparsity-Inducing Penalties

Sparse estimation methods are aimed at using or obtaining parsimonious representations of data or models. They were first dedicated to linear variable selection but numerous extensions have now emerged such as structured sparsity or kernel selection. It turns out that many of the related estimation problems can be cast as convex optimization problems by regularizing the empirical risk with appropriate non-smooth norms. The goal of this paper is to present from a general perspective optimization tools and techniques dedicated to such sparsity-inducing penalties. We cover proximal methods, block-coordinate descent, reweighted $\ell_2$-penalized techniques, working-set and homotopy methods, as well as non-convex formulations and extensions, and provide an extensive set of experiments to compare various algorithms from a computational point of view

Super-Linear Convergence of Dual Augmented-Lagrangian Algorithm for Sparsity Regularized Estimation

We analyze the convergence behaviour of a recently proposed algorithm for regularized estimation called Dual Augmented Lagrangian (DAL). Our analysis is based on a new interpretation of DAL as a proximal minimization algorithm. We theoretically show under some conditions that DAL converges super-linearly in a non-asymptotic and global sense. Due to a special modelling of sparse estimation problems in the context of machine learning, the assumptions we make are milder and more natural than those made in conventional analysis of augmented Lagrangian algorithms. In addition, the new interpretation enables us to generalize DAL to wide varieties of sparse estimation problems. We experimentally confirm our analysis in a large scale $\ell_1$-regularized logistic regression problem and extensively compare the efficiency of DAL algorithm to previously proposed algorithms on both synthetic and benchmark datasets.Comment: 51 pages, 9 figure