9,939 research outputs found
Quasi-Newton approaches to Interior Point Methods for quadratic problems
Interior Point Methods (IPM) rely on the Newton method for solving systems of
nonlinear equations. Solving the linear systems which arise from this approach
is the most computationally expensive task of an interior point iteration. If,
due to problem's inner structure, there are special techniques for efficiently
solving linear systems, IPMs enjoy fast convergence and are able to solve large
scale optimization problems. It is tempting to try to replace the Newton method
by quasi-Newton methods. Quasi-Newton approaches to IPMs either are built to
approximate the Lagrangian function for nonlinear programming problems or
provide an inexpensive preconditioner. In this work we study the impact of
using quasi-Newton methods applied directly to the nonlinear system of
equations for general quadratic programming problems. The cost of each
iteration can be compared to the cost of computing correctors in a usual
interior point iteration. Numerical experiments show that the new approach is
able to reduce the overall number of matrix factorizations and is suitable for
a matrix-free implementation
Large-scale Binary Quadratic Optimization Using Semidefinite Relaxation and Applications
In computer vision, many problems such as image segmentation, pixel
labelling, and scene parsing can be formulated as binary quadratic programs
(BQPs). For submodular problems, cuts based methods can be employed to
efficiently solve large-scale problems. However, general nonsubmodular problems
are significantly more challenging to solve. Finding a solution when the
problem is of large size to be of practical interest, however, typically
requires relaxation. Two standard relaxation methods are widely used for
solving general BQPs--spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each
with their own advantages and disadvantages. Spectral relaxation is simple and
easy to implement, but its bound is loose. Semidefinite relaxation has a
tighter bound, but its computational complexity is high, especially for large
scale problems. In this work, we present a new SDP formulation for BQPs, with
two desirable properties. First, it has a similar relaxation bound to
conventional SDP formulations. Second, compared with conventional SDP methods,
the new SDP formulation leads to a significantly more efficient and scalable
dual optimization approach, which has the same degree of complexity as spectral
methods. We then propose two solvers, namely, quasi-Newton and smoothing Newton
methods, for the dual problem. Both of them are significantly more efficiently
than standard interior-point methods. In practice, the smoothing Newton solver
is faster than the quasi-Newton solver for dense or medium-sized problems,
while the quasi-Newton solver is preferable for large sparse/structured
problems. Our experiments on a few computer vision applications including
clustering, image segmentation, co-segmentation and registration show the
potential of our SDP formulation for solving large-scale BQPs.Comment: Fixed some typos. 18 pages. Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligenc
Projection methods in conic optimization
There exist efficient algorithms to project a point onto the intersection of
a convex cone and an affine subspace. Those conic projections are in turn the
work-horse of a range of algorithms in conic optimization, having a variety of
applications in science, finance and engineering. This chapter reviews some of
these algorithms, emphasizing the so-called regularization algorithms for
linear conic optimization, and applications in polynomial optimization. This is
a presentation of the material of several recent research articles; we aim here
at clarifying the ideas, presenting them in a general framework, and pointing
out important techniques
Efficient SDP Inference for Fully-connected CRFs Based on Low-rank Decomposition
Conditional Random Fields (CRF) have been widely used in a variety of
computer vision tasks. Conventional CRFs typically define edges on neighboring
image pixels, resulting in a sparse graph such that efficient inference can be
performed. However, these CRFs fail to model long-range contextual
relationships. Fully-connected CRFs have thus been proposed. While there are
efficient approximate inference methods for such CRFs, usually they are
sensitive to initialization and make strong assumptions. In this work, we
develop an efficient, yet general algorithm for inference on fully-connected
CRFs. The algorithm is based on a scalable SDP algorithm and the low- rank
approximation of the similarity/kernel matrix. The core of the proposed
algorithm is a tailored quasi-Newton method that takes advantage of the
low-rank matrix approximation when solving the specialized SDP dual problem.
Experiments demonstrate that our method can be applied on fully-connected CRFs
that cannot be solved previously, such as pixel-level image co-segmentation.Comment: 15 pages. A conference version of this work appears in Proc. IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 201
Regularized Optimal Transport and the Rot Mover's Distance
This paper presents a unified framework for smooth convex regularization of
discrete optimal transport problems. In this context, the regularized optimal
transport turns out to be equivalent to a matrix nearness problem with respect
to Bregman divergences. Our framework thus naturally generalizes a previously
proposed regularization based on the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy related to the
Kullback-Leibler divergence, and solved with the Sinkhorn-Knopp algorithm. We
call the regularized optimal transport distance the rot mover's distance in
reference to the classical earth mover's distance. We develop two generic
schemes that we respectively call the alternate scaling algorithm and the
non-negative alternate scaling algorithm, to compute efficiently the
regularized optimal plans depending on whether the domain of the regularizer
lies within the non-negative orthant or not. These schemes are based on
Dykstra's algorithm with alternate Bregman projections, and further exploit the
Newton-Raphson method when applied to separable divergences. We enhance the
separable case with a sparse extension to deal with high data dimensions. We
also instantiate our proposed framework and discuss the inherent specificities
for well-known regularizers and statistical divergences in the machine learning
and information geometry communities. Finally, we demonstrate the merits of our
methods with experiments using synthetic data to illustrate the effect of
different regularizers and penalties on the solutions, as well as real-world
data for a pattern recognition application to audio scene classification
A quasi-Newton proximal splitting method
A new result in convex analysis on the calculation of proximity operators in
certain scaled norms is derived. We describe efficient implementations of the
proximity calculation for a useful class of functions; the implementations
exploit the piece-wise linear nature of the dual problem. The second part of
the paper applies the previous result to acceleration of convex minimization
problems, and leads to an elegant quasi-Newton method. The optimization method
compares favorably against state-of-the-art alternatives. The algorithm has
extensive applications including signal processing, sparse recovery and machine
learning and classification
On Quasi-Newton Forward--Backward Splitting: Proximal Calculus and Convergence
We introduce a framework for quasi-Newton forward--backward splitting
algorithms (proximal quasi-Newton methods) with a metric induced by diagonal
rank- symmetric positive definite matrices. This special type of
metric allows for a highly efficient evaluation of the proximal mapping. The
key to this efficiency is a general proximal calculus in the new metric. By
using duality, formulas are derived that relate the proximal mapping in a
rank- modified metric to the original metric. We also describe efficient
implementations of the proximity calculation for a large class of functions;
the implementations exploit the piece-wise linear nature of the dual problem.
Then, we apply these results to acceleration of composite convex minimization
problems, which leads to elegant quasi-Newton methods for which we prove
convergence. The algorithm is tested on several numerical examples and compared
to a comprehensive list of alternatives in the literature. Our quasi-Newton
splitting algorithm with the prescribed metric compares favorably against
state-of-the-art. The algorithm has extensive applications including signal
processing, sparse recovery, machine learning and classification to name a few.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1206.115
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