1,042 research outputs found
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
A Riemannian low-rank method for optimization over semidefinite matrices with block-diagonal constraints
We propose a new algorithm to solve optimization problems of the form for a smooth function under the constraints that is positive
semidefinite and the diagonal blocks of are small identity matrices. Such
problems often arise as the result of relaxing a rank constraint (lifting). In
particular, many estimation tasks involving phases, rotations, orthonormal
bases or permutations fit in this framework, and so do certain relaxations of
combinatorial problems such as Max-Cut. The proposed algorithm exploits the
facts that (1) such formulations admit low-rank solutions, and (2) their
rank-restricted versions are smooth optimization problems on a Riemannian
manifold. Combining insights from both the Riemannian and the convex geometries
of the problem, we characterize when second-order critical points of the smooth
problem reveal KKT points of the semidefinite problem. We compare against state
of the art, mature software and find that, on certain interesting problem
instances, what we call the staircase method is orders of magnitude faster, is
more accurate and scales better. Code is available.Comment: 37 pages, 3 figure
- …