187 research outputs found
Non-smooth Non-convex Bregman Minimization: Unification and new Algorithms
We propose a unifying algorithm for non-smooth non-convex optimization. The
algorithm approximates the objective function by a convex model function and
finds an approximate (Bregman) proximal point of the convex model. This
approximate minimizer of the model function yields a descent direction, along
which the next iterate is found. Complemented with an Armijo-like line search
strategy, we obtain a flexible algorithm for which we prove (subsequential)
convergence to a stationary point under weak assumptions on the growth of the
model function error. Special instances of the algorithm with a Euclidean
distance function are, for example, Gradient Descent, Forward--Backward
Splitting, ProxDescent, without the common requirement of a "Lipschitz
continuous gradient". In addition, we consider a broad class of Bregman
distance functions (generated by Legendre functions) replacing the Euclidean
distance. The algorithm has a wide range of applications including many linear
and non-linear inverse problems in signal/image processing and machine
learning
Proximity Operators of Discrete Information Divergences
Information divergences allow one to assess how close two distributions are
from each other. Among the large panel of available measures, a special
attention has been paid to convex -divergences, such as
Kullback-Leibler, Jeffreys-Kullback, Hellinger, Chi-Square, Renyi, and
I divergences. While -divergences have been extensively
studied in convex analysis, their use in optimization problems often remains
challenging. In this regard, one of the main shortcomings of existing methods
is that the minimization of -divergences is usually performed with
respect to one of their arguments, possibly within alternating optimization
techniques. In this paper, we overcome this limitation by deriving new
closed-form expressions for the proximity operator of such two-variable
functions. This makes it possible to employ standard proximal methods for
efficiently solving a wide range of convex optimization problems involving
-divergences. In addition, we show that these proximity operators are
useful to compute the epigraphical projection of several functions of practical
interest. The proposed proximal tools are numerically validated in the context
of optimal query execution within database management systems, where the
problem of selectivity estimation plays a central role. Experiments are carried
out on small to large scale scenarios
Entropic Wasserstein Gradient Flows
This article details a novel numerical scheme to approximate gradient flows
for optimal transport (i.e. Wasserstein) metrics. These flows have proved
useful to tackle theoretically and numerically non-linear diffusion equations
that model for instance porous media or crowd evolutions. These gradient flows
define a suitable notion of weak solutions for these evolutions and they can be
approximated in a stable way using discrete flows. These discrete flows are
implicit Euler time stepping according to the Wasserstein metric. A bottleneck
of these approaches is the high computational load induced by the resolution of
each step. Indeed, this corresponds to the resolution of a convex optimization
problem involving a Wasserstein distance to the previous iterate. Following
several recent works on the approximation of Wasserstein distances, we consider
a discrete flow induced by an entropic regularization of the transportation
coupling. This entropic regularization allows one to trade the initial
Wasserstein fidelity term for a Kulback-Leibler divergence, which is easier to
deal with numerically. We show how KL proximal schemes, and in particular
Dykstra's algorithm, can be used to compute each step of the regularized flow.
The resulting algorithm is both fast, parallelizable and versatile, because it
only requires multiplications by a Gibbs kernel. On Euclidean domains
discretized on an uniform grid, this corresponds to a linear filtering (for
instance a Gaussian filtering when is the squared Euclidean distance) which
can be computed in nearly linear time. On more general domains, such as
(possibly non-convex) shapes or on manifolds discretized by a triangular mesh,
following a recently proposed numerical scheme for optimal transport, this
Gibbs kernel multiplication is approximated by a short-time heat diffusion
Parameter Selection and Pre-Conditioning for a Graph Form Solver
In a recent paper, Parikh and Boyd describe a method for solving a convex
optimization problem, where each iteration involves evaluating a proximal
operator and projection onto a subspace. In this paper we address the critical
practical issues of how to select the proximal parameter in each iteration, and
how to scale the original problem variables, so as the achieve reliable
practical performance. The resulting method has been implemented as an
open-source software package called POGS (Proximal Graph Solver), that targets
multi-core and GPU-based systems, and has been tested on a wide variety of
practical problems. Numerical results show that POGS can solve very large
problems (with, say, more than a billion coefficients in the data), to modest
accuracy in a few tens of seconds. As just one example, a radiation treatment
planning problem with around 100 million coefficients in the data can be solved
in a few seconds, as compared to around one hour with an interior-point method.Comment: 28 pages, 1 figure, 1 open source implementatio
Algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization with the beta-divergence
This paper describes algorithms for nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF)
with the beta-divergence (beta-NMF). The beta-divergence is a family of cost
functions parametrized by a single shape parameter beta that takes the
Euclidean distance, the Kullback-Leibler divergence and the Itakura-Saito
divergence as special cases (beta = 2,1,0, respectively). The proposed
algorithms are based on a surrogate auxiliary function (a local majorization of
the criterion function). We first describe a majorization-minimization (MM)
algorithm that leads to multiplicative updates, which differ from standard
heuristic multiplicative updates by a beta-dependent power exponent. The
monotonicity of the heuristic algorithm can however be proven for beta in (0,1)
using the proposed auxiliary function. Then we introduce the concept of
majorization-equalization (ME) algorithm which produces updates that move along
constant level sets of the auxiliary function and lead to larger steps than MM.
Simulations on synthetic and real data illustrate the faster convergence of the
ME approach. The paper also describes how the proposed algorithms can be
adapted to two common variants of NMF : penalized NMF (i.e., when a penalty
function of the factors is added to the criterion function) and convex-NMF
(when the dictionary is assumed to belong to a known subspace).Comment: \`a para\^itre dans Neural Computatio
Fast Image Recovery Using Variable Splitting and Constrained Optimization
We propose a new fast algorithm for solving one of the standard formulations
of image restoration and reconstruction which consists of an unconstrained
optimization problem where the objective includes an data-fidelity
term and a non-smooth regularizer. This formulation allows both wavelet-based
(with orthogonal or frame-based representations) regularization or
total-variation regularization. Our approach is based on a variable splitting
to obtain an equivalent constrained optimization formulation, which is then
addressed with an augmented Lagrangian method. The proposed algorithm is an
instance of the so-called "alternating direction method of multipliers", for
which convergence has been proved. Experiments on a set of image restoration
and reconstruction benchmark problems show that the proposed algorithm is
faster than the current state of the art methods.Comment: Submitted; 11 pages, 7 figures, 6 table
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