2,387 research outputs found
Conic Optimization Theory: Convexification Techniques and Numerical Algorithms
Optimization is at the core of control theory and appears in several areas of
this field, such as optimal control, distributed control, system
identification, robust control, state estimation, model predictive control and
dynamic programming. The recent advances in various topics of modern
optimization have also been revamping the area of machine learning. Motivated
by the crucial role of optimization theory in the design, analysis, control and
operation of real-world systems, this tutorial paper offers a detailed overview
of some major advances in this area, namely conic optimization and its emerging
applications. First, we discuss the importance of conic optimization in
different areas. Then, we explain seminal results on the design of hierarchies
of convex relaxations for a wide range of nonconvex problems. Finally, we study
different numerical algorithms for large-scale conic optimization problems.Comment: 18 page
Contrastive Learning for Lifted Networks
In this work we address supervised learning of neural networks via lifted
network formulations. Lifted networks are interesting because they allow
training on massively parallel hardware and assign energy models to
discriminatively trained neural networks. We demonstrate that the training
methods for lifted networks proposed in the literature have significant
limitations and show how to use a contrastive loss to address those
limitations. We demonstrate that this contrastive training approximates
back-propagation in theory and in practice and that it is superior to the
training objective regularly used for lifted networks.Comment: 9 pages, BMVC 201
An Exponential Lower Bound on the Complexity of Regularization Paths
For a variety of regularized optimization problems in machine learning,
algorithms computing the entire solution path have been developed recently.
Most of these methods are quadratic programs that are parameterized by a single
parameter, as for example the Support Vector Machine (SVM). Solution path
algorithms do not only compute the solution for one particular value of the
regularization parameter but the entire path of solutions, making the selection
of an optimal parameter much easier.
It has been assumed that these piecewise linear solution paths have only
linear complexity, i.e. linearly many bends. We prove that for the support
vector machine this complexity can be exponential in the number of training
points in the worst case. More strongly, we construct a single instance of n
input points in d dimensions for an SVM such that at least \Theta(2^{n/2}) =
\Theta(2^d) many distinct subsets of support vectors occur as the
regularization parameter changes.Comment: Journal version, 28 Pages, 5 Figure
Efficient Semidefinite Branch-and-Cut for MAP-MRF Inference
We propose a Branch-and-Cut (B&C) method for solving general MAP-MRF
inference problems. The core of our method is a very efficient bounding
procedure, which combines scalable semidefinite programming (SDP) and a
cutting-plane method for seeking violated constraints. In order to further
speed up the computation, several strategies have been exploited, including
model reduction, warm start and removal of inactive constraints.
We analyze the performance of the proposed method under different settings,
and demonstrate that our method either outperforms or performs on par with
state-of-the-art approaches. Especially when the connectivities are dense or
when the relative magnitudes of the unary costs are low, we achieve the best
reported results. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves better
approximation than the state-of-the-art methods within a variety of time
budgets on challenging non-submodular MAP-MRF inference problems.Comment: 21 page
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