1,629 research outputs found
CoCoA: A General Framework for Communication-Efficient Distributed Optimization
The scale of modern datasets necessitates the development of efficient
distributed optimization methods for machine learning. We present a
general-purpose framework for distributed computing environments, CoCoA, that
has an efficient communication scheme and is applicable to a wide variety of
problems in machine learning and signal processing. We extend the framework to
cover general non-strongly-convex regularizers, including L1-regularized
problems like lasso, sparse logistic regression, and elastic net
regularization, and show how earlier work can be derived as a special case. We
provide convergence guarantees for the class of convex regularized loss
minimization objectives, leveraging a novel approach in handling
non-strongly-convex regularizers and non-smooth loss functions. The resulting
framework has markedly improved performance over state-of-the-art methods, as
we illustrate with an extensive set of experiments on real distributed
datasets
Discrete-Continuous ADMM for Transductive Inference in Higher-Order MRFs
This paper introduces a novel algorithm for transductive inference in
higher-order MRFs, where the unary energies are parameterized by a variable
classifier. The considered task is posed as a joint optimization problem in the
continuous classifier parameters and the discrete label variables. In contrast
to prior approaches such as convex relaxations, we propose an advantageous
decoupling of the objective function into discrete and continuous subproblems
and a novel, efficient optimization method related to ADMM. This approach
preserves integrality of the discrete label variables and guarantees global
convergence to a critical point. We demonstrate the advantages of our approach
in several experiments including video object segmentation on the DAVIS data
set and interactive image segmentation
Playing with Duality: An Overview of Recent Primal-Dual Approaches for Solving Large-Scale Optimization Problems
Optimization methods are at the core of many problems in signal/image
processing, computer vision, and machine learning. For a long time, it has been
recognized that looking at the dual of an optimization problem may drastically
simplify its solution. Deriving efficient strategies which jointly brings into
play the primal and the dual problems is however a more recent idea which has
generated many important new contributions in the last years. These novel
developments are grounded on recent advances in convex analysis, discrete
optimization, parallel processing, and non-smooth optimization with emphasis on
sparsity issues. In this paper, we aim at presenting the principles of
primal-dual approaches, while giving an overview of numerical methods which
have been proposed in different contexts. We show the benefits which can be
drawn from primal-dual algorithms both for solving large-scale convex
optimization problems and discrete ones, and we provide various application
examples to illustrate their usefulness
Primal-Dual Rates and Certificates
We propose an algorithm-independent framework to equip existing optimization
methods with primal-dual certificates. Such certificates and corresponding rate
of convergence guarantees are important for practitioners to diagnose progress,
in particular in machine learning applications. We obtain new primal-dual
convergence rates, e.g., for the Lasso as well as many L1, Elastic Net, group
Lasso and TV-regularized problems. The theory applies to any norm-regularized
generalized linear model. Our approach provides efficiently computable duality
gaps which are globally defined, without modifying the original problems in the
region of interest.Comment: appearing at ICML 2016 - Proceedings of the 33rd International
Conference on Machine Learning, New York, NY, USA, 2016. JMLR: W&CP volume 4
A Unified Successive Pseudo-Convex Approximation Framework
In this paper, we propose a successive pseudo-convex approximation algorithm
to efficiently compute stationary points for a large class of possibly
nonconvex optimization problems. The stationary points are obtained by solving
a sequence of successively refined approximate problems, each of which is much
easier to solve than the original problem. To achieve convergence, the
approximate problem only needs to exhibit a weak form of convexity, namely,
pseudo-convexity. We show that the proposed framework not only includes as
special cases a number of existing methods, for example, the gradient method
and the Jacobi algorithm, but also leads to new algorithms which enjoy easier
implementation and faster convergence speed. We also propose a novel line
search method for nondifferentiable optimization problems, which is carried out
over a properly constructed differentiable function with the benefit of a
simplified implementation as compared to state-of-the-art line search
techniques that directly operate on the original nondifferentiable objective
function. The advantages of the proposed algorithm are shown, both
theoretically and numerically, by several example applications, namely, MIMO
broadcast channel capacity computation, energy efficiency maximization in
massive MIMO systems and LASSO in sparse signal recovery.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; original title:
A Novel Iterative Convex Approximation Metho
Sum-Rate Maximization in Two-Way AF MIMO Relaying: Polynomial Time Solutions to a Class of DC Programming Problems
Sum-rate maximization in two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) multiple-input
multiple-output (MIMO) relaying belongs to the class of difference-of-convex
functions (DC) programming problems. DC programming problems occur as well in
other signal processing applications and are typically solved using different
modifications of the branch-and-bound method. This method, however, does not
have any polynomial time complexity guarantees. In this paper, we show that a
class of DC programming problems, to which the sum-rate maximization in two-way
MIMO relaying belongs, can be solved very efficiently in polynomial time, and
develop two algorithms. The objective function of the problem is represented as
a product of quadratic ratios and parameterized so that its convex part (versus
the concave part) contains only one (or two) optimization variables. One of the
algorithms is called POlynomial-Time DC (POTDC) and is based on semi-definite
programming (SDP) relaxation, linearization, and an iterative search over a
single parameter. The other algorithm is called RAte-maximization via
Generalized EigenvectorS (RAGES) and is based on the generalized eigenvectors
method and an iterative search over two (or one, in its approximate version)
optimization variables. We also derive an upper-bound for the optimal values of
the corresponding optimization problem and show by simulations that this
upper-bound can be achieved by both algorithms. The proposed methods for
maximizing the sum-rate in the two-way AF MIMO relaying system are shown to be
superior to other state-of-the-art algorithms.Comment: 35 pages, 10 figures, Submitted to the IEEE Trans. Signal Processing
in Nov. 201
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