647 research outputs found
Computing Large-Scale Matrix and Tensor Decomposition with Structured Factors: A Unified Nonconvex Optimization Perspective
The proposed article aims at offering a comprehensive tutorial for the
computational aspects of structured matrix and tensor factorization. Unlike
existing tutorials that mainly focus on {\it algorithmic procedures} for a
small set of problems, e.g., nonnegativity or sparsity-constrained
factorization, we take a {\it top-down} approach: we start with general
optimization theory (e.g., inexact and accelerated block coordinate descent,
stochastic optimization, and Gauss-Newton methods) that covers a wide range of
factorization problems with diverse constraints and regularization terms of
engineering interest. Then, we go `under the hood' to showcase specific
algorithm design under these introduced principles. We pay a particular
attention to recent algorithmic developments in structured tensor and matrix
factorization (e.g., random sketching and adaptive step size based stochastic
optimization and structure-exploiting second-order algorithms), which are the
state of the art---yet much less touched upon in the literature compared to
{\it block coordinate descent} (BCD)-based methods. We expect that the article
to have an educational values in the field of structured factorization and hope
to stimulate more research in this important and exciting direction.Comment: Final Version; to appear in IEEE Signal Processing Magazine; title
revised to comply with the journal's rul
From Symmetry to Geometry: Tractable Nonconvex Problems
As science and engineering have become increasingly data-driven, the role of
optimization has expanded to touch almost every stage of the data analysis
pipeline, from the signal and data acquisition to modeling and prediction. The
optimization problems encountered in practice are often nonconvex. While
challenges vary from problem to problem, one common source of nonconvexity is
nonlinearity in the data or measurement model. Nonlinear models often exhibit
symmetries, creating complicated, nonconvex objective landscapes, with multiple
equivalent solutions. Nevertheless, simple methods (e.g., gradient descent)
often perform surprisingly well in practice.
The goal of this survey is to highlight a class of tractable nonconvex
problems, which can be understood through the lens of symmetries. These
problems exhibit a characteristic geometric structure: local minimizers are
symmetric copies of a single "ground truth" solution, while other critical
points occur at balanced superpositions of symmetric copies of the ground
truth, and exhibit negative curvature in directions that break the symmetry.
This structure enables efficient methods to obtain global minimizers. We
discuss examples of this phenomenon arising from a wide range of problems in
imaging, signal processing, and data analysis. We highlight the key role of
symmetry in shaping the objective landscape and discuss the different roles of
rotational and discrete symmetries. This area is rich with observed phenomena
and open problems; we close by highlighting directions for future research.Comment: review paper submitted to SIAM Review, 34 pages, 10 figure
Tensorized LSSVMs for Multitask Regression
Multitask learning (MTL) can utilize the relatedness between multiple tasks
for performance improvement. The advent of multimodal data allows tasks to be
referenced by multiple indices. High-order tensors are capable of providing
efficient representations for such tasks, while preserving structural
task-relations. In this paper, a new MTL method is proposed by leveraging
low-rank tensor analysis and constructing tensorized Least Squares Support
Vector Machines, namely the tLSSVM-MTL, where multilinear modelling and its
nonlinear extensions can be flexibly exerted. We employ a high-order tensor for
all the weights with each mode relating to an index and factorize it with CP
decomposition, assigning a shared factor for all tasks and retaining
task-specific latent factors along each index. Then an alternating algorithm is
derived for the nonconvex optimization, where each resulting subproblem is
solved by a linear system. Experimental results demonstrate promising
performances of our tLSSVM-MTL
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Nonconvex Recovery of Low-complexity Models
Today we are living in the era of big data, there is a pressing need for efficient, scalable and robust optimization methods to analyze the data we create and collect. Although Convex methods offer tractable solutions with global optimality, heuristic nonconvex methods are often more attractive in practice due to their superior efficiency and scalability. Moreover, for better representations of the data, the mathematical model we are building today are much more complicated, which often results in highly nonlinear and nonconvex optimizations problems. Both of these challenges require us to go beyond convex optimization. While nonconvex optimization is extraordinarily successful in practice, unlike convex optimization, guaranteeing the correctness of nonconvex methods is notoriously difficult. In theory, even finding a local minimum of a general nonconvex function is NP-hard – nevermind the global minimum.
This thesis aims to bridge the gap between practice and theory of nonconvex optimization, by developing global optimality guarantees for nonconvex problems arising in real-world engineering applications, and provable, efficient nonconvex optimization algorithms. First, this thesis reveals that for certain nonconvex problems we can construct a model specialized initialization that is close to the optimal solution, so that simple and efficient methods provably converge to the global solution with linear rate. These problem include sparse basis learning and convolutional phase retrieval. In addition, the work has led to the discovery of a broader class of nonconvex problems – the so-called ridable saddle functions. Those problems possess characteristic structures, in which (i) all local minima are global, (ii) the energy landscape does not have any ''flat'' saddle points. More interestingly, when data are large and random, this thesis reveals that many problems in the real world are indeed ridable saddle, those problems include complete dictionary learning and generalized phase retrieval. For each of the aforementioned problems, the benign geometric structure allows us to obtain global recovery guarantees by using efficient optimization methods with arbitrary initialization
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