19,080 research outputs found
Partial Sum Minimization of Singular Values in Robust PCA: Algorithm and Applications
Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) via rank minimization is a
powerful tool for recovering underlying low-rank structure of clean data
corrupted with sparse noise/outliers. In many low-level vision problems, not
only it is known that the underlying structure of clean data is low-rank, but
the exact rank of clean data is also known. Yet, when applying conventional
rank minimization for those problems, the objective function is formulated in a
way that does not fully utilize a priori target rank information about the
problems. This observation motivates us to investigate whether there is a
better alternative solution when using rank minimization. In this paper,
instead of minimizing the nuclear norm, we propose to minimize the partial sum
of singular values, which implicitly encourages the target rank constraint. Our
experimental analyses show that, when the number of samples is deficient, our
approach leads to a higher success rate than conventional rank minimization,
while the solutions obtained by the two approaches are almost identical when
the number of samples is more than sufficient. We apply our approach to various
low-level vision problems, e.g. high dynamic range imaging, motion edge
detection, photometric stereo, image alignment and recovery, and show that our
results outperform those obtained by the conventional nuclear norm rank
minimization method.Comment: Accepted in Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(TPAMI). To appea
Non-convex Optimization for Machine Learning
A vast majority of machine learning algorithms train their models and perform
inference by solving optimization problems. In order to capture the learning
and prediction problems accurately, structural constraints such as sparsity or
low rank are frequently imposed or else the objective itself is designed to be
a non-convex function. This is especially true of algorithms that operate in
high-dimensional spaces or that train non-linear models such as tensor models
and deep networks.
The freedom to express the learning problem as a non-convex optimization
problem gives immense modeling power to the algorithm designer, but often such
problems are NP-hard to solve. A popular workaround to this has been to relax
non-convex problems to convex ones and use traditional methods to solve the
(convex) relaxed optimization problems. However this approach may be lossy and
nevertheless presents significant challenges for large scale optimization.
On the other hand, direct approaches to non-convex optimization have met with
resounding success in several domains and remain the methods of choice for the
practitioner, as they frequently outperform relaxation-based techniques -
popular heuristics include projected gradient descent and alternating
minimization. However, these are often poorly understood in terms of their
convergence and other properties.
This monograph presents a selection of recent advances that bridge a
long-standing gap in our understanding of these heuristics. The monograph will
lead the reader through several widely used non-convex optimization techniques,
as well as applications thereof. The goal of this monograph is to both,
introduce the rich literature in this area, as well as equip the reader with
the tools and techniques needed to analyze these simple procedures for
non-convex problems.Comment: The official publication is available from now publishers via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/220000005
Conic Optimization Theory: Convexification Techniques and Numerical Algorithms
Optimization is at the core of control theory and appears in several areas of
this field, such as optimal control, distributed control, system
identification, robust control, state estimation, model predictive control and
dynamic programming. The recent advances in various topics of modern
optimization have also been revamping the area of machine learning. Motivated
by the crucial role of optimization theory in the design, analysis, control and
operation of real-world systems, this tutorial paper offers a detailed overview
of some major advances in this area, namely conic optimization and its emerging
applications. First, we discuss the importance of conic optimization in
different areas. Then, we explain seminal results on the design of hierarchies
of convex relaxations for a wide range of nonconvex problems. Finally, we study
different numerical algorithms for large-scale conic optimization problems.Comment: 18 page
- …