Scalable Convex Methods for Phase Retrieval

This paper describes scalable convex optimization methods for phase retrieval. The main characteristics of these methods are the cheap per-iteration complexity and the low-memory footprint. With a variant of the original PhaseLift formulation, we first illustrate how to leverage the scalable Frank-Wolfe (FW) method (also known as the conditional gradient algorithm), which requires a tuning parameter. We demonstrate that we can estimate the tuning parameter of the FW algorithm directly from the measurements, with rigorous theoretical guarantees. We then illustrate numerically that recent advances in universal primal-dual convex optimization methods offer significant scalability improvements over the FW method, by recovering full HD resolution color images from their quadratic measurements

Sketchy Decisions: Convex Low-Rank Matrix Optimization with Optimal Storage

This paper considers a fundamental class of convex matrix optimization problems with low-rank solutions. We show it is possible to solve these problem using far less memory than the natural size of the decision variable when the problem data has a concise representation. Our proposed method, SketchyCGM, is the first algorithm to offer provable convergence to an optimal point with an optimal memory footprint. SketchyCGM modifies a standard convex optimization method - the conditional gradient method - to work on a sketched version of the decision variable, and can recover the solution from this sketch. In contrast to recent work on non-convex methods for this problem class, SketchyCGM is a convex method; and our convergence guarantees do not rely on statistical assumptions

Scalable Semidefinite Programming

Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful framework from convex optimization that has striking potential for data science applications. This paper develops a provably correct algorithm for solving large SDP problems by economizing on both the storage and the arithmetic costs. Numerical evidence shows that the method is effective for a range of applications, including relaxations of MaxCut, abstract phase retrieval, and quadratic assignment. Running on a laptop, the algorithm can handle SDP instances where the matrix variable has over 10¹³ entries