Proceedings of the second "international Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST'14)

The implicit objective of the biennial "international - Traveling Workshop on Interactions between Sparse models and Technology" (iTWIST) is to foster collaboration between international scientific teams by disseminating ideas through both specific oral/poster presentations and free discussions. For its second edition, the iTWIST workshop took place in the medieval and picturesque town of Namur in Belgium, from Wednesday August 27th till Friday August 29th, 2014. The workshop was conveniently located in "The Arsenal" building within walking distance of both hotels and town center. iTWIST'14 has gathered about 70 international participants and has featured 9 invited talks, 10 oral presentations, and 14 posters on the following themes, all related to the theory, application and generalization of the "sparsity paradigm": Sparsity-driven data sensing and processing; Union of low dimensional subspaces; Beyond linear and convex inverse problem; Matrix/manifold/graph sensing/processing; Blind inverse problems and dictionary learning; Sparsity and computational neuroscience; Information theory, geometry and randomness; Complexity/accuracy tradeoffs in numerical methods; Sparsity? What's next?; Sparse machine learning and inference.Comment: 69 pages, 24 extended abstracts, iTWIST'14 website: http://sites.google.com/site/itwist1

Low Complexity Regularization of Linear Inverse Problems

Inverse problems and regularization theory is a central theme in contemporary signal processing, where the goal is to reconstruct an unknown signal from partial indirect, and possibly noisy, measurements of it. A now standard method for recovering the unknown signal is to solve a convex optimization problem that enforces some prior knowledge about its structure. This has proved efficient in many problems routinely encountered in imaging sciences, statistics and machine learning. This chapter delivers a review of recent advances in the field where the regularization prior promotes solutions conforming to some notion of simplicity/low-complexity. These priors encompass as popular examples sparsity and group sparsity (to capture the compressibility of natural signals and images), total variation and analysis sparsity (to promote piecewise regularity), and low-rank (as natural extension of sparsity to matrix-valued data). Our aim is to provide a unified treatment of all these regularizations under a single umbrella, namely the theory of partial smoothness. This framework is very general and accommodates all low-complexity regularizers just mentioned, as well as many others. Partial smoothness turns out to be the canonical way to encode low-dimensional models that can be linear spaces or more general smooth manifolds. This review is intended to serve as a one stop shop toward the understanding of the theoretical properties of the so-regularized solutions. It covers a large spectrum including: (i) recovery guarantees and stability to noise, both in terms of $\ell^2$-stability and model (manifold) identification; (ii) sensitivity analysis to perturbations of the parameters involved (in particular the observations), with applications to unbiased risk estimation ; (iii) convergence properties of the forward-backward proximal splitting scheme, that is particularly well suited to solve the corresponding large-scale regularized optimization problem

A Riemannian ADMM

We consider a class of Riemannian optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function, considered in the ambient space. This class of problems finds important applications in machine learning and statistics such as the sparse principal component analysis, sparse spectral clustering, and orthogonal dictionary learning. We propose a Riemannian alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to solve this class of problems. Our algorithm adopts easily computable steps in each iteration. The iteration complexity of the proposed algorithm for obtaining an $\epsilon$-stationary point is analyzed under mild assumptions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first Riemannian ADMM with provable convergence guarantee for solving Riemannian optimization problem with nonsmooth objective. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method

Decentralized Weakly Convex Optimization Over the Stiefel Manifold

We focus on a class of non-smooth optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold in the decentralized setting, where a connected network of $n$ agents cooperatively minimize a finite-sum objective function with each component being weakly convex in the ambient Euclidean space. Such optimization problems, albeit frequently encountered in applications, are quite challenging due to their non-smoothness and non-convexity. To tackle them, we propose an iterative method called the decentralized Riemannian subgradient method (DRSM). The global convergence and an iteration complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2} \log^2(\varepsilon^{-1}))$ for forcing a natural stationarity measure below $\varepsilon$ are established via the powerful tool of proximal smoothness from variational analysis, which could be of independent interest. Besides, we show the local linear convergence of the DRSM using geometrically diminishing stepsizes when the problem at hand further possesses a sharpness property. Numerical experiments are conducted to corroborate our theoretical findings.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Sparse Modeling for Image and Vision Processing

In recent years, a large amount of multi-disciplinary research has been conducted on sparse models and their applications. In statistics and machine learning, the sparsity principle is used to perform model selection---that is, automatically selecting a simple model among a large collection of them. In signal processing, sparse coding consists of representing data with linear combinations of a few dictionary elements. Subsequently, the corresponding tools have been widely adopted by several scientific communities such as neuroscience, bioinformatics, or computer vision. The goal of this monograph is to offer a self-contained view of sparse modeling for visual recognition and image processing. More specifically, we focus on applications where the dictionary is learned and adapted to data, yielding a compact representation that has been successful in various contexts.Comment: 205 pages, to appear in Foundations and Trends in Computer Graphics and Visio