5,093 research outputs found
Using Optimization to Obtain a Width-Independent, Parallel, Simpler, and Faster Positive SDP Solver
We study the design of polylogarithmic depth algorithms for approximately
solving packing and covering semidefinite programs (or positive SDPs for
short). This is a natural SDP generalization of the well-studied positive LP
problem.
Although positive LPs can be solved in polylogarithmic depth while using only
parallelizable iterations, the best known
positive SDP solvers due to Jain and Yao require parallelizable iterations. Several alternative solvers have
been proposed to reduce the exponents in the number of iterations. However, the
correctness of the convergence analyses in these works has been called into
question, as they both rely on algebraic monotonicity properties that do not
generalize to matrix algebra.
In this paper, we propose a very simple algorithm based on the optimization
framework proposed for LP solvers. Our algorithm only needs iterations, matching that of the best LP solver. To surmount
the obstacles encountered by previous approaches, our analysis requires a new
matrix inequality that extends Lieb-Thirring's inequality, and a
sign-consistent, randomized variant of the gradient truncation technique
proposed in
An asymptotically superlinearly convergent semismooth Newton augmented Lagrangian method for Linear Programming
Powerful interior-point methods (IPM) based commercial solvers, such as
Gurobi and Mosek, have been hugely successful in solving large-scale linear
programming (LP) problems. The high efficiency of these solvers depends
critically on the sparsity of the problem data and advanced matrix
factorization techniques. For a large scale LP problem with data matrix
that is dense (possibly structured) or whose corresponding normal matrix
has a dense Cholesky factor (even with re-ordering), these solvers may require
excessive computational cost and/or extremely heavy memory usage in each
interior-point iteration. Unfortunately, the natural remedy, i.e., the use of
iterative methods based IPM solvers, although can avoid the explicit
computation of the coefficient matrix and its factorization, is not practically
viable due to the inherent extreme ill-conditioning of the large scale normal
equation arising in each interior-point iteration. To provide a better
alternative choice for solving large scale LPs with dense data or requiring
expensive factorization of its normal equation, we propose a semismooth Newton
based inexact proximal augmented Lagrangian ({\sc Snipal}) method. Different
from classical IPMs, in each iteration of {\sc Snipal}, iterative methods can
efficiently be used to solve simpler yet better conditioned semismooth Newton
linear systems. Moreover, {\sc Snipal} not only enjoys a fast asymptotic
superlinear convergence but is also proven to enjoy a finite termination
property. Numerical comparisons with Gurobi have demonstrated encouraging
potential of {\sc Snipal} for handling large-scale LP problems where the
constraint matrix has a dense representation or has a dense
factorization even with an appropriate re-ordering.Comment: Due to the limitation "The abstract field cannot be longer than 1,920
characters", the abstract appearing here is slightly shorter than that in the
PDF fil
Linear Coupling: An Ultimate Unification of Gradient and Mirror Descent
First-order methods play a central role in large-scale machine learning. Even
though many variations exist, each suited to a particular problem, almost all
such methods fundamentally rely on two types of algorithmic steps: gradient
descent, which yields primal progress, and mirror descent, which yields dual
progress.
We observe that the performances of gradient and mirror descent are
complementary, so that faster algorithms can be designed by LINEARLY COUPLING
the two. We show how to reconstruct Nesterov's accelerated gradient methods
using linear coupling, which gives a cleaner interpretation than Nesterov's
original proofs. We also discuss the power of linear coupling by extending it
to many other settings that Nesterov's methods cannot apply to.Comment: A new section added; polished writin
Similarity-Aware Spectral Sparsification by Edge Filtering
In recent years, spectral graph sparsification techniques that can compute
ultra-sparse graph proxies have been extensively studied for accelerating
various numerical and graph-related applications. Prior nearly-linear-time
spectral sparsification methods first extract low-stretch spanning tree from
the original graph to form the backbone of the sparsifier, and then recover
small portions of spectrally-critical off-tree edges to the spanning tree to
significantly improve the approximation quality. However, it is not clear how
many off-tree edges should be recovered for achieving a desired spectral
similarity level within the sparsifier. Motivated by recent graph signal
processing techniques, this paper proposes a similarity-aware spectral graph
sparsification framework that leverages efficient spectral off-tree edge
embedding and filtering schemes to construct spectral sparsifiers with
guaranteed spectral similarity (relative condition number) level. An iterative
graph densification scheme is introduced to facilitate efficient and effective
filtering of off-tree edges for highly ill-conditioned problems. The proposed
method has been validated using various kinds of graphs obtained from public
domain sparse matrix collections relevant to VLSI CAD, finite element analysis,
as well as social and data networks frequently studied in many machine learning
and data mining applications
Nearly linear-time packing and covering LP solvers
Packing and covering linear programs (PC-LP s) form an important class of linear programs (LPs) across computer science, operations research, and optimization. Luby and Nisan (in: STOC, ACM Press, New York, 1993) constructed an iterative algorithm for approximately solving PC-LP s in nearly linear time, where the time complexity scales nearly linearly in N, the number of nonzero entries of the matrix, and polynomially in , the (multiplicative) approximation error. Unfortunately, existing nearly linear-time algorithms (Plotkin et al. in Math Oper Res 20(2):257–301, 1995; Bartal et al., in: Proceedings 38th annual symposium on foundations of computer science, IEEE Computer Society, 1997; Young, in: 42nd annual IEEE symposium on foundations of computer science (FOCS’01), IEEE Computer Society, 2001; Koufogiannakis and Young in Algorithmica 70:494–506, 2013; Young in Nearly linear-time approximation schemes for mixed packing/covering and facility-location linear programs, 2014. arXiv:1407.3015; Allen-Zhu and Orecchia, in: SODA, 2015) for solving PC-LP s require time at least proportional to −2. In this paper, we break this longstanding barrier by designing a packing solver that runs in time ˜(−1) and covering LP solver that runs in time ˜(−1.5). Our packing solver can be extended to run in time ˜(−1) for a class of well-behaved covering programs. In a follow-up work, Wang et al. (in: ICALP, 2016) showed that all covering LPs can be converted into well-behaved ones by a reduction that blows up the problem size only logarithmically.Accepted manuscrip
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