888 research outputs found
International Conference on Continuous Optimization (ICCOPT) 2019 Conference Book
The Sixth International Conference on Continuous Optimization took place on the campus of the Technical University of Berlin, August 3-8, 2019. The ICCOPT is a flagship conference of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), organized every three years. ICCOPT 2019 was hosted by the Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics (WIAS) Berlin. It included a Summer School and a Conference with a series of plenary and semi-plenary talks, organized and contributed sessions, and poster sessions.
This book comprises the full conference program. It contains, in particular, the scientific program in survey style as well as with all details, and information on the social program, the venue, special meetings, and more
A one-phase interior point method for nonconvex optimization
The work of Wachter and Biegler suggests that infeasible-start interior point
methods (IPMs) developed for linear programming cannot be adapted to nonlinear
optimization without significant modification, i.e., using a two-phase or
penalty method. We propose an IPM that, by careful initialization and updates
of the slack variables, is guaranteed to find a first-order certificate of
local infeasibility, local optimality or unboundedness of the (shifted)
feasible region. Our proposed algorithm differs from other IPM methods for
nonconvex programming because we reduce primal feasibility at the same rate as
the barrier parameter. This gives an algorithm with more robust convergence
properties and closely resembles successful algorithms from linear programming.
We implement the algorithm and compare with IPOPT on a subset of CUTEst
problems. Our algorithm requires a similar median number of iterations, but
fails on only 9% of the problems compared with 16% for IPOPT. Experiments on
infeasible variants of the CUTEst problems indicate superior performance for
detecting infeasibility.
The code for our implementation can be found at
https://github.com/ohinder/OnePhase .Comment: fixed typo in sign of dual multiplier in KKT syste
A Distributed Newton Method for Network Utility Maximization
Most existing work uses dual decomposition and subgradient methods to solve
Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problems in a distributed manner, which
suffer from slow rate of convergence properties. This work develops an
alternative distributed Newton-type fast converging algorithm for solving
network utility maximization problems with self-concordant utility functions.
By using novel matrix splitting techniques, both primal and dual updates for
the Newton step can be computed using iterative schemes in a decentralized
manner with limited information exchange. Similarly, the stepsize can be
obtained via an iterative consensus-based averaging scheme. We show that even
when the Newton direction and the stepsize in our method are computed within
some error (due to finite truncation of the iterative schemes), the resulting
objective function value still converges superlinearly to an explicitly
characterized error neighborhood. Simulation results demonstrate significant
convergence rate improvement of our algorithm relative to the existing
subgradient methods based on dual decomposition.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, LIDS report, submitted to CDC 201
New algorithmic developments in maximum consensus robust fitting
In many computer vision applications, the task of robustly estimating the set of parameters of
a geometric model is a fundamental problem. Despite the longstanding research efforts on robust
model fitting, there remains significant scope for investigation. For a large number of geometric
estimation tasks in computer vision, maximum consensus is the most popular robust fitting
criterion. This thesis makes several contributions in the algorithms for consensus maximization.
Randomized hypothesize-and-verify algorithms are arguably the most widely used class of
techniques for robust estimation thanks to their simplicity. Though efficient, these randomized
heuristic methods do not guarantee finding good maximum consensus estimates. To improve the
randomize algorithms, guided sampling approaches have been developed. These methods take
advantage of additional domain information, such as descriptor matching scores, to guide the
sampling process. Subsets of the data that are more likely to result in good estimates are prioritized
for consideration. However, these guided sampling approaches are ineffective when good
domain information is not available. This thesis tackles this shortcoming by proposing a new
guided sampling algorithm, which is based on the class of LP-type problems and Monte Carlo
Tree Search (MCTS). The proposed algorithm relies on a fundamental geometric arrangement
of the data to guide the sampling process. Specifically, we take advantage of the underlying tree
structure of the maximum consensus problem and apply MCTS to efficiently search the tree.
Empirical results show that the new guided sampling strategy outperforms traditional randomized
methods.
Consensus maximization also plays a key role in robust point set registration. A special case
is the registration of deformable shapes. If the surfaces have the same intrinsic shapes, their
deformations can be described accurately by a conformal model. The uniformization theorem
allows the shapes to be conformally mapped onto a canonical domain, wherein the shapes can be
aligned using a M¨obius transformation. The problem of correspondence-free M¨obius alignment
of two sets of noisy and partially overlapping point sets can be tackled as a maximum consensus
problem. Solving for the M¨obius transformation can be approached by randomized voting-type
methods which offers no guarantee of optimality. Local methods such as Iterative Closest Point
can be applied, but with the assumption that a good initialization is given or these techniques
may converge to a bad local minima. When a globally optimal solution is required, the literature
has so far considered only brute-force search. This thesis contributes a new branch-and-bound
algorithm that solves for the globally optimal M¨obius transformation much more efficiently.
So far, the consensus maximization problems are approached mainly by randomized algorithms,
which are efficient but offer no analytical convergence guarantee. On the other hand,
there exist exact algorithms that can solve the problem up to global optimality. The global methods,
however, are intractable in general due to the NP-hardness of the consensus maximization. To fill the gap between the two extremes, this thesis contributes two novel deterministic algorithms
to approximately optimize the maximum consensus criterion. The first method is based
on non-smooth penalization supported by a Frank-Wolfe-style optimization scheme, and another
algorithm is based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM). Both of the
proposed methods are capable of handling the non-linear geometric residuals commonly used in
computer vision. As will be demonstrated, our proposed methods consistently outperform other
heuristics and approximate methods.Thesis (Ph.D.) (Research by Publication) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 201
Computational methods for Cahn-Hilliard variational inequalities
We consider the non-standard fourth order parabolic Cahn-Hilliard variational inequality with constant as well as non-constant diffusional mobility. We propose a primal-dual active set method as solution technique for the discrete variational inequality given by a (semi-)implicit Euler discretization in time and linear finite elements in space. We show local convergence of the method by reinterpretation as a semi-smooth Newton method. The discrete saddle point system arising in each iteration step is handled by either a Gauss-Seidel type method, the application of a multi-frontal direct solver or a preconditioned conjugate gradient method applied to the Schur complement. Finally we show the efficiency of the method and the preconditioning with several numerical simulations
Constrained optimization in seismic reflection tomography: a Gauss-Newton augmented Lagrangian approach
International audienceS U M M A R Y Seismic reflection tomography is a method for determining a subsurface velocity model from the traveltimes of seismic waves reflecting on geological interfaces. From an optimization viewpoint , the problem consists in minimizing a non-linear least-squares function measuring the mismatch between observed traveltimes and those calculated by ray tracing in this model. The introduction of a priori information on the model is crucial to reduce the under-determination. The contribution of this paper is to introduce a technique able to take into account geological a priori information in the reflection tomography problem expressed as inequality constraints in the optimization problem. This technique is based on a Gauss-Newton (GN) sequential quadratic programming approach. At each GN step, a solution to a convex quadratic optimization problem subject to linear constraints is computed thanks to an augmented Lagrangian algorithm. Our choice for this optimization method is motivated and its original aspects are described. First applications on real data sets are presented to illustrate the potential of the approach in practical use of reflection tomography
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