395 research outputs found
An Infeasible-Point Subgradient Method Using Adaptive Approximate Projections
We propose a new subgradient method for the minimization of nonsmooth convex
functions over a convex set. To speed up computations we use adaptive
approximate projections only requiring to move within a certain distance of the
exact projections (which decreases in the course of the algorithm). In
particular, the iterates in our method can be infeasible throughout the whole
procedure. Nevertheless, we provide conditions which ensure convergence to an
optimal feasible point under suitable assumptions. One convergence result deals
with step size sequences that are fixed a priori. Two other results handle
dynamic Polyak-type step sizes depending on a lower or upper estimate of the
optimal objective function value, respectively. Additionally, we briefly sketch
two applications: Optimization with convex chance constraints, and finding the
minimum l1-norm solution to an underdetermined linear system, an important
problem in Compressed Sensing.Comment: 36 pages, 3 figure
Getting Feasible Variable Estimates From Infeasible Ones: MRF Local Polytope Study
This paper proposes a method for construction of approximate feasible primal
solutions from dual ones for large-scale optimization problems possessing
certain separability properties. Whereas infeasible primal estimates can
typically be produced from (sub-)gradients of the dual function, it is often
not easy to project them to the primal feasible set, since the projection
itself has a complexity comparable to the complexity of the initial problem. We
propose an alternative efficient method to obtain feasibility and show that its
properties influencing the convergence to the optimum are similar to the
properties of the Euclidean projection. We apply our method to the local
polytope relaxation of inference problems for Markov Random Fields and
demonstrate its superiority over existing methods.Comment: 20 page, 4 figure
MAP inference via Block-Coordinate Frank-Wolfe Algorithm
We present a new proximal bundle method for Maximum-A-Posteriori (MAP)
inference in structured energy minimization problems. The method optimizes a
Lagrangean relaxation of the original energy minimization problem using a multi
plane block-coordinate Frank-Wolfe method that takes advantage of the specific
structure of the Lagrangean decomposition. We show empirically that our method
outperforms state-of-the-art Lagrangean decomposition based algorithms on some
challenging Markov Random Field, multi-label discrete tomography and graph
matching problems
The Convergence Guarantees of a Non-convex Approach for Sparse Recovery
In the area of sparse recovery, numerous researches hint that non-convex
penalties might induce better sparsity than convex ones, but up until now those
corresponding non-convex algorithms lack convergence guarantees from the
initial solution to the global optimum. This paper aims to provide performance
guarantees of a non-convex approach for sparse recovery. Specifically, the
concept of weak convexity is incorporated into a class of sparsity-inducing
penalties to characterize the non-convexity. Borrowing the idea of the
projected subgradient method, an algorithm is proposed to solve the non-convex
optimization problem. In addition, a uniform approximate projection is adopted
in the projection step to make this algorithm computationally tractable for
large scale problems. The convergence analysis is provided in the noisy
scenario. It is shown that if the non-convexity of the penalty is below a
threshold (which is in inverse proportion to the distance between the initial
solution and the sparse signal), the recovered solution has recovery error
linear in both the step size and the noise term. Numerical simulations are
implemented to test the performance of the proposed approach and verify the
theoretical analysis.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figure
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, we show that the sequential
subgradient projection method is perturbation resilient. By this we mean that
under appropriate conditions the sequence generated by the method converges
weakly, and sometimes also strongly, to a point in the intersection of the
given subsets of the feasibility problem, despite certain perturbations which
are allowed in each iterative step. Unlike previous works on solving the convex
feasibility problem, the involved functions, which induce the feasibility
problem's subsets, need not be convex. Instead, we allow them to belong to a
wider and richer class of functions satisfying a weaker condition, that we call
"zero-convexity". This class, which is introduced and discussed here, holds a
promise to solve optimization problems in various areas, especially in
non-smooth and non-convex optimization. The relevance of this study to
approximate minimization and to the recent superiorization methodology for
constrained optimization is explained.Comment: Mathematical Programming Series A, accepted for publicatio
A generalized projection-based scheme for solving convex constrained optimization problems
In this paper we present a new algorithmic realization of a projection-based
scheme for general convex constrained optimization problem. The general idea is
to transform the original optimization problem to a sequence of feasibility
problems by iteratively constraining the objective function from above until
the feasibility problem is inconsistent. For each of the feasibility problems
one may apply any of the existing projection methods for solving it. In
particular, the scheme allows the use of subgradient projections and does not
require exact projections onto the constraints sets as in existing similar
methods.
We also apply the newly introduced concept of superiorization to optimization
formulation and compare its performance to our scheme. We provide some
numerical results for convex quadratic test problems as well as for real-life
optimization problems coming from medical treatment planning.Comment: Accepted to publication in Computational Optimization and
Application
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
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