Higher-order Projected Power Iterations for Scalable Multi-Matching

The matching of multiple objects (e.g. shapes or images) is a fundamental problem in vision and graphics. In order to robustly handle ambiguities, noise and repetitive patterns in challenging real-world settings, it is essential to take geometric consistency between points into account. Computationally, the multi-matching problem is difficult. It can be phrased as simultaneously solving multiple (NP-hard) quadratic assignment problems (QAPs) that are coupled via cycle-consistency constraints. The main limitations of existing multi-matching methods are that they either ignore geometric consistency and thus have limited robustness, or they are restricted to small-scale problems due to their (relatively) high computational cost. We address these shortcomings by introducing a Higher-order Projected Power Iteration method, which is (i) efficient and scales to tens of thousands of points, (ii) straightforward to implement, (iii) able to incorporate geometric consistency, (iv) guarantees cycle-consistent multi-matchings, and (iv) comes with theoretical convergence guarantees. Experimentally we show that our approach is superior to existing methods

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

Convex Relaxations for Permutation Problems

Seriation seeks to reconstruct a linear order between variables using unsorted, pairwise similarity information. It has direct applications in archeology and shotgun gene sequencing for example. We write seriation as an optimization problem by proving the equivalence between the seriation and combinatorial 2-SUM problems on similarity matrices (2-SUM is a quadratic minimization problem over permutations). The seriation problem can be solved exactly by a spectral algorithm in the noiseless case and we derive several convex relaxations for 2-SUM to improve the robustness of seriation solutions in noisy settings. These convex relaxations also allow us to impose structural constraints on the solution, hence solve semi-supervised seriation problems. We derive new approximation bounds for some of these relaxations and present numerical experiments on archeological data, Markov chains and DNA assembly from shotgun gene sequencing data.Comment: Final journal version, a few typos and references fixe

A Scalable Algorithm For Sparse Portfolio Selection

The sparse portfolio selection problem is one of the most famous and frequently-studied problems in the optimization and financial economics literatures. In a universe of risky assets, the goal is to construct a portfolio with maximal expected return and minimum variance, subject to an upper bound on the number of positions, linear inequalities and minimum investment constraints. Existing certifiably optimal approaches to this problem do not converge within a practical amount of time at real world problem sizes with more than 400 securities. In this paper, we propose a more scalable approach. By imposing a ridge regularization term, we reformulate the problem as a convex binary optimization problem, which is solvable via an efficient outer-approximation procedure. We propose various techniques for improving the performance of the procedure, including a heuristic which supplies high-quality warm-starts, a preprocessing technique for decreasing the gap at the root node, and an analytic technique for strengthening our cuts. We also study the problem's Boolean relaxation, establish that it is second-order-cone representable, and supply a sufficient condition for its tightness. In numerical experiments, we establish that the outer-approximation procedure gives rise to dramatic speedups for sparse portfolio selection problems.Comment: Submitted to INFORMS Journal on Computin

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

MINA: {C}onvex Mixed-Integer Programming for Non-Rigid Shape Alignment

We present a convex mixed-integer programming formulation for non-rigid shape matching. To this end, we propose a novel shape deformation model based on an efficient low-dimensional discrete model, so that finding a globally optimal solution is tractable in (most) practical cases. Our approach combines several favourable properties: it is independent of the initialisation, it is much more efficient to solve to global optimality compared to analogous quadratic assignment problem formulations, and it is highly flexible in terms of the variants of matching problems it can handle. Experimentally we demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing methods for sparse shape matching, that it can be used for initialising dense shape matching methods, and we showcase its flexibility on several examples

Optimization for Probabilistic Machine Learning

We have access to great variety of datasets more than any time in the history. Everyday, more data is collected from various natural resources and digital platforms. Great advances in the area of machine learning research in the past few decades have relied strongly on availability of these datasets. However, analyzing them imposes significant challenges that are mainly due to two factors. First, the datasets have complex structures with hidden interdependencies. Second, most of the valuable datasets are high dimensional and are largely scaled. The main goal of a machine learning framework is to design a model that is a valid representative of the observations and develop a learning algorithm to make inference about unobserved or latent data based on the observations. Discovering hidden patterns and inferring latent characteristics in such datasets is one of the greatest challenges in the area of machine learning research. In this dissertation, I will investigate some of the challenges in modeling and algorithm design, and present my research results on how to overcome these obstacles. Analyzing data generally involves two main stages. The first stage is designing a model that is flexible enough to capture complex variation and latent structures in data and is robust enough to generalize well to the unseen data. Designing an expressive and interpretable model is one of crucial objectives in this stage. The second stage involves training learning algorithm on the observed data and measuring the accuracy of model and learning algorithm. This stage usually involves an optimization problem whose objective is to tune the model to the training data and learn the model parameters. Finding global optimal or sufficiently good local optimal solution is one of the main challenges in this step. Probabilistic models are one of the best known models for capturing data generating process and quantifying uncertainties in data using random variables and probability distributions. They are powerful models that are shown to be adaptive and robust and can scale well to large datasets. However, most probabilistic models have a complex structure. Training them could become challenging commonly due to the presence of intractable integrals in the calculation. To remedy this, they require approximate inference strategies that often results in non-convex optimization problems. The optimization part ensures that the model is the best representative of data or data generating process. The non-convexity of an optimization problem take away the general guarantee on finding a global optimal solution. It will be shown later in this dissertation that inference for a significant number of probabilistic models require solving a non-convex optimization problem. One of the well-known methods for approximate inference in probabilistic modeling is variational inference. In the Bayesian setting, the target is to learn the true posterior distribution for model parameters given the observations and prior distributions. The main challenge involves marginalization of all the other variables in the model except for the variable of interest. This high-dimensional integral is generally computationally hard, and for many models there is no known polynomial time algorithm for calculating them exactly. Variational inference deals with finding an approximate posterior distribution for Bayesian models where finding the true posterior distribution is analytically or numerically impossible. It assumes a family of distribution for the estimation, and finds the closest member of that family to the true posterior distribution using a distance measure. For many models though, this technique requires solving a non-convex optimization problem that has no general guarantee on reaching a global optimal solution. This dissertation presents a convex relaxation technique for dealing with hardness of the optimization involved in the inference. The proposed convex relaxation technique is based on semidefinite optimization that has a general applicability to polynomial optimization problem. I will present theoretical foundations and in-depth details of this relaxation in this work. Linear dynamical systems represent the functionality of many real-world physical systems. They can describe the dynamics of a linear time-varying observation which is controlled by a controller unit with quadratic cost function objectives. Designing distributed and decentralized controllers is the goal of many of these systems, which computationally, results in a non-convex optimization problem. In this dissertation, I will further investigate the issues arising in this area and develop a convex relaxation framework to deal with the optimization challenges. Setting the correct number of model parameters is an important aspect for a good probabilistic model. If there are only a few parameters, model may lack capturing all the essential relations and components in the observations while too many parameters may cause significant complications in learning or overfit to the observations. Non-parametric models are suitable techniques to deal with this issue. They allow the model to learn the appropriate number of parameters to describe the data and make predictions. In this dissertation, I will present my work on designing Bayesian non-parametric models as powerful tools for learning representations of data. Moreover, I will describe the algorithm that we derived to efficiently train the model on the observations and learn the number of model parameters. Later in this dissertation, I will present my works on designing probabilistic models in combination with deep learning methods for representing sequential data. Sequential datasets comprise a significant portion of resources in the area of machine learning research. Designing models to capture dependencies in sequential datasets are of great interest and have a wide variety of applications in engineering, medicine and statistics. Recent advances in deep learning research has shown exceptional promises in this area. However, they lack interpretability in their general form. To remedy this, I will present my work on mixing probabilistic models with neural network models that results in better performance and expressiveness of the results