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We present a novel, practical, and provable approach for solving diagonally constrained semi-definite programming (SDP) problems at scale using accelerated non-convex programming. Our algorithm non-trivially combines acceleration motions from convex optimization with coordinate power iteration and matrix factorization techniques. The algorithm is extremely simple to implement, and adds only a single extra hyperparameter -- momentum. We prove that our method admits local linear convergence in the neighborhood of the optimum and always converges to a first-order critical point. Experimentally, we showcase the merits of our method on three major application domains: MaxCut, MaxSAT, and MIMO signal detection. In all cases, our methodology provides significant speedups over non-convex and convex SDP solvers -- 5X faster than state-of-the-art non-convex solvers, and 9 to 10^3 X faster than convex SDP solvers -- with comparable or improved solution quality.
Difference-of-Convex (DC) minimization, referring to the problem of minimizing the difference of two convex functions, has been found rich applications in statistical learning and studied extensively for decades. However, existing methods are primarily based on multi-stage convex relaxation, only leading to weak optimality of critical points. This paper proposes a coordinate descent method for minimizing DC functions based on sequential nonconvex approximation. Our approach iteratively solves a nonconvex one-dimensional subproblem globally, and it is guaranteed to converge to a coordinate-wise stationary point. We prove that this new optimality condition is always stronger than the critical point condition and the directional point condition when the objective function is weakly convex. For comparisons, we also include a naive variant of coordinate descent methods based on sequential convex approximation in our study. When the objective function satisfies an additional regularity condition called emph{sharpness}, coordinate descent methods with an appropriate initialization converge emph{linearly} to the optimal solution set. Also, for many applications of interest, we show that the nonconvex one-dimensional subproblem can be computed exactly and efficiently using a breakpoint searching method. We present some discussions and extensions of our proposed method. Finally, we have conducted extensive experiments on several statistical learning tasks to show the superiority of our approach. Keywords: Coordinate Descent, DC Minimization, DC Programming, Difference-of-Convex Programs, Nonconvex Optimization, Sparse Optimization, Binary Optimization.
In this paper, we propose a new global analysis framework for a class of low-rank matrix recovery problems on the Riemannian manifold. We analyze the global behavior for the Riemannian optimization with random initialization. We use the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm to minimize a least squares loss function, and study the asymptotic behavior as well as the exact convergence rate. We reveal a previously unknown geometric property of the low-rank matrix manifold, which is the existence of spurious critical points for the simple least squares function on the manifold. We show that under some assumptions, the Riemannian gradient descent starting from a random initialization with high probability avoids these spurious critical points and only converges to the ground truth in nearly linear convergence rate, i.e. $mathcal{O}(text{log}(frac{1}{epsilon})+ text{log}(n))$ iterations to reach an $epsilon$-accurate solution. We use two applications as examples for our global analysis. The first one is a rank-1 matrix recovery problem. The second one is a generalization of the Gaussian phase retrieval problem. It only satisfies the weak isometry property, but has behavior similar to that of the first one except for an extra saddle set. Our convergence guarantee is nearly optimal and almost dimension-free, which fully explains the numerical observations. The global analysis can be potentially extended to other data problems with random measurement structures and empirical least squares loss functions.
We show that the Riemannian gradient descent algorithm on the low-rank matrix manifold almost surely escapes some spurious critical points on the boundary of the manifold. Given that the low-rank matrix manifold is an incomplete set, this result is the first to overcome this difficulty and partially justify the global use of the Riemannian gradient descent on the manifold. The spurious critical points are some rank-deficient matrices that capture only part of the SVD components of the ground truth. They exhibit very singular behavior and evade the classical analysis of strict saddle points. We show that using the dynamical low-rank approximation and a rescaled gradient flow, some of the spurious critical points can be converted to classical strict saddle points, which leads to the desired result. Numerical experiments are provided to support our theoretical findings.
The method of block coordinate gradient descent (BCD) has been a powerful method for large-scale optimization. This paper considers the BCD method that successively updates a series of blocks selected according to a Markov chain. This kind of block selection is neither i.i.d. random nor cyclic. On the other hand, it is a natural choice for some applications in distributed optimization and Markov decision process, where i.i.d. random and cyclic selections are either infeasible or very expensive. By applying mixing-time properties of a Markov chain, we prove convergence of Markov chain BCD for minimizing Lipschitz differentiable functions, which can be nonconvex. When the functions are convex and strongly convex, we establish both sublinear and linear convergence rates, respectively. We also present a method of Markov chain inertial BCD. Finally, we discuss potential applications.
We present a novel randomized block coordinate descent method for the minimization of a convex composite objective function. The method uses (approximate) partial second-order (curvature) information, so that the algorithm performance is more robust when applied to highly nonseparable or ill conditioned problems. We call the method Flexible Coordinate Descent (FCD). At each iteration of FCD, a block of coordinates is sampled randomly, a quadratic model is formed about that block and the model is minimized emph{approximately/inexactly} to determine the search direction. An inexpensive line search is then employed to ensure a monotonic decrease in the objective function and acceptance of large step sizes. We present several high probability iteration complexity results to show that convergence of FCD is guaranteed theoretically. Finally, we present numerical results on large-scale problems to demonstrate the practical performance of the method.