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This paper studies the matrix completion problem under arbitrary sampling schemes. We propose a new estimator incorporating both max-norm and nuclear-norm regularization, based on which we can conduct efficient low-rank matrix recovery using a random subset of entries observed with additive noise under general non-uniform and unknown sampling distributions. This method significantly relaxes the uniform sampling assumption imposed for the widely used nuclear-norm penalized approach, and makes low-rank matrix recovery feasible in more practical settings. Theoretically, we prove that the proposed estimator achieves fast rates of convergence under different settings. Computationally, we propose an alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm to efficiently compute the estimator, which bridges a gap between theory and practice of machine learning methods with max-norm regularization. Further, we provide thorough numerical studies to evaluate the proposed method using both simulated and real datasets.
Distributionally robust supervised learning (DRSL) is emerging as a key paradigm for building reliable machine learning systems for real-world applications -- reflecting the need for classifiers and predictive models that are robust to the distribution shifts that arise from phenomena such as selection bias or nonstationarity. Existing algorithms for solving Wasserstein DRSL -- one of the most popular DRSL frameworks based around robustness to perturbations in the Wasserstein distance -- involve solving complex subproblems or fail to make use of stochastic gradients, limiting their use in large-scale machine learning problems. We revisit Wasserstein DRSL through the lens of min-max optimization and derive scalable and efficiently implementable stochastic extra-gradient algorithms which provably achieve faster convergence rates than existing approaches. We demonstrate their effectiveness on synthetic and real data when compared to existing DRSL approaches. Key to our results is the use of variance reduction and random reshuffling to accelerate stochastic min-max optimization, the analysis of which may be of independent interest.
We study the problem of robust subspace recovery (RSR) in the presence of adversarial outliers. That is, we seek a subspace that contains a large portion of a dataset when some fraction of the data points are arbitrarily corrupted. We first examine a theoretical estimator that is intractable to calculate and use it to derive information-theoretic bounds of exact recovery. We then propose two tractable estimators: a variant of RANSAC and a simple relaxation of the theoretical estimator. The two estimators are fast to compute and achieve state-of-the-art theoretical performance in a noiseless RSR setting with adversarial outliers. The former estimator achieves better theoretical guarantees in the noiseless case, while the latter estimator is robust to small noise, and its guarantees significantly improve with non-adversarial models of outliers. We give a complete comparison of guarantees for the adversarial RSR problem, as well as a short discussion on the estimation of affine subspaces.
Fourier domain structured low-rank matrix priors are emerging as powerful alternatives to traditional image recovery methods such as total variation and wavelet regularization. These priors specify that a convolutional structured matrix, i.e., Toeplitz, Hankel, or their multi-level generalizations, built from Fourier data of the image should be low-rank. The main challenge in applying these schemes to large-scale problems is the computational complexity and memory demand resulting from lifting the image data to a large scale matrix. We introduce a fast and memory efficient approach called the Generic Iterative Reweighted Annihilation Filter (GIRAF) algorithm that exploits the convolutional structure of the lifted matrix to work in the original un-lifted domain, thus considerably reducing the complexity. Our experiments on the recovery of images from undersampled Fourier measurements show that the resulting algorithm is considerably faster than previously proposed algorithms, and can accommodate much larger problem sizes than previously studied.
We address the problem of efficient sparse fixed-rank (S-FR) matrix decomposition, i.e., splitting a corrupted matrix $M$ into an uncorrupted matrix $L$ of rank $r$ and a sparse matrix of outliers $S$. Fixed-rank constraints are usually imposed by the physical restrictions of the system under study. Here we propose a method to perform accurate and very efficient S-FR decomposition that is more suitable for large-scale problems than existing approaches. Our method is a grateful combination of geometrical and algebraical techniques, which avoids the bottleneck caused by the Truncated SVD (TSVD). Instead, a polar factorization is used to exploit the manifold structure of fixed-rank problems as the product of two Stiefel and an SPD manifold, leading to a better convergence and stability. Then, closed-form projectors help to speed up each iteration of the method. We introduce a novel and fast projector for the $text{SPD}$ manifold and a proof of its validity. Further acceleration is achieved using a Nystrom scheme. Extensive experiments with synthetic and real data in the context of robust photometric stereo and spectral clustering show that our proposals outperform the state of the art.
In behavioural economics, a decision makers preferences are expressed by choice functions. Preference robust optimization (PRO) is concerned with problems where the decision makers preferences are ambiguous, and the optimal decision is based on a robust choice function with respect to a preference ambiguity set. In this paper, we propose a PRO model to support choice functions that are: (i) monotonic (prefer more to less), (ii) quasi-concave (prefer diversification), and (iii) multi-attribute (have multiple objectives/criteria). As our main result, we show that the robust choice function can be constructed efficiently by solving a sequence of linear programming problems. Then, the robust choice function can be optimized efficiently by solving a sequence of convex optimization problems. Our numerical experiments for the portfolio optimization and capital allocation problems show that our method is practical and scalable.