arXiv research

SDP achieves Bayes error rate in synchronization and block models.

A new method for clustering heterogeneous data using likelihood-adjusted SDP.

Semidefinite programs (SDP) are important in learning and combinatorial optimization with numerous applications. In pursuit of low-rank solutions and low complexity algorithms, we consider the Burer--Monteiro factorization approach for solving SDPs. We show that all approximate local optima are global optima for the pe…

Simplifies solving noisy SDPs for low rank matrix recovery problems.

The stochastic block model (SBM) is a popular tool for community detection in networks, but fitting it by maximum likelihood (MLE) involves a computationally infeasible optimization problem. We propose a new semidefinite programming (SDP) solution to the problem of fitting the SBM, derived as a relaxation of the MLE. W…

We consider the problem of estimating the discrete clustering structures under the Sub-Gaussian Mixture Model. Our main results establish a hidden integrality property of a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for this problem: while the optimal solution to the SDP is not integer-valued in general, its estimation …

The paper studies SDP feasibility and sos ranks for specific polynomials.

A new method solves diagonally constrained SDPs quickly and accurately.

A fast algorithm for $K$-means clustering using subsampled SDP.

Several probabilistic models from high-dimensional statistics and machine learning reveal an intriguing --and yet poorly understood-- dichotomy. Either simple local algorithms succeed in estimating the object of interest, or even sophisticated semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxations fail. In order to explore this p…

SDP achieves optimal error in noisy phase synchronization.

Motivated by the task of clustering either $d$ variables or $d$ points into $K$ groups, we investigate efficient algorithms to solve the Peng-Wei (P-W) $K$-means semi-definite programming (SDP) relaxation. The P-W SDP has been shown in the literature to have good statistical properties in a variety of settings, but rem…

New algorithm improves clustering accuracy without sacrificing scalability.

A number of statistical estimation problems can be addressed by semidefinite programs (SDP). While SDPs are solvable in polynomial time using interior point methods, in practice generic SDP solvers do not scale well to high-dimensional problems. In order to cope with this problem, Burer and Monteiro proposed a non-conv…

In this paper, we analyze different preconditionings designed to enhance robustness of pure-pixel search algorithms, which are used for blind hyperspectral unmixing and which are equivalent to near-separable nonnegative matrix factorization algorithms. Our analysis focuses on the successive projection algorithm (SPA), …

Paper uses SDP for community detection with side information.

New SDP method certifies neural network robustness across all classes efficiently.

Sharp condition found for Burer-Monteiro method to work for MaxCut-type SDPs.

Geometric technique determines exactness of SDP robustness certificate.

We study the problem of controlling linear time-invariant systems with known noisy dynamics and adversarially chosen quadratic losses. We present the first efficient online learning algorithms in this setting that guarantee $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret under mild assumptions, where $T$ is the time horizon. Our algorithms rely …

Optimal neural network approximation for Wasserstein gradient direction via convex optimization.

We study a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the maximum likelihood estimation for exactly recovering a hidden community of cardinality $K$ from an $n \times n$ symmetric data matrix $A$, where for distinct indices $i,j$, $A_{ij} \sim P$ if $i, j$ are both in the community and $A_{ij} \sim Q$ otherwise, for …

Unified framework guarantees exactness of asymmetric low-rank SDP learning.

A large number of problems in optimization, machine learning, signal processing can be effectively addressed by suitable semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations. Unfortunately, generic SDP solvers hardly scale beyond instances with a few hundreds variables (in the underlying combinatorial problem). On the other hand…

Paper presents a randomized algorithm for SPCA with high probability approximation.

New algorithm estimates mean in high dimensions with nearly-linear time, robust to corrupted data.

We propose a semidefinite programming (SDP) algorithm for community detection in the stochastic block model, a popular model for networks with latent community structure. We prove that our algorithm achieves exact recovery of the latent communities, up to the information-theoretic limits determined by Abbe and Sandon (…

New scalable Lipschitz bounds improve neural network robustness analysis.

Resolving a conjecture of Abbe, Bandeira and Hall, the authors have recently shown that the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the maximum likelihood estimator achieves the sharp threshold for exactly recovering the community structure under the binary stochastic block model of two equal-sized clusters. The s…

SDP approach recovers communities in multilayer hypergraphs from aggregated similarity matrices.

Paper improves robustness of SDP algorithms with nonconvex loss functions.

New algorithm reduces kernel optimization complexity.

In this paper we consider the cluster estimation problem under the Stochastic Block Model. We show that the semidefinite programming (SDP) formulation for this problem achieves an error rate that decays exponentially in the signal-to-noise ratio. The error bound implies weak recovery in the sparse graph regime with bou…

New SDP algorithm recovers large clusters in SBM with small clusters of any size.

Recently, Awasthi et al. introduced an SDP relaxation of the $k$-means problem in $\mathbb R^m$. In this work, we consider a random model for the data points in which $k$ balls of unit radius are deterministically distributed throughout $\mathbb R^m$, and then in each ball, $n$ points are drawn according to a common ro…

The well-known Influence Maximization (IM) problem has been actively studied by researchers over the past decade, with emphasis on marketing and social networks. Existing research have obtained solutions to the IM problem by obtaining the influence spread and utilizing the property of submodularity. This paper is based…

This paper describes a fast algorithm for recovering low-rank matrices from their linear measurements contaminated with Poisson noise: the Poisson noise Maximum Likelihood Singular Value thresholding (PMLSV) algorithm. We propose a convex optimization formulation with a cost function consisting of the sum of a likeliho…

Paper shows Burer-Monteiro method can solve SDPs in polynomial time under smoothed analysis.

AMP algorithms can be efficiently simulated by SDPs even with corrupted data.

Unified framework for hard affine SDP constraints in vRKHSs.

We have observed an interesting, yet unexplained, phenomenon: Semidefinite programming (SDP) based relaxations of maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) tend to be tight in recovery problems with noisy data, even when MLE cannot exactly recover the ground truth. Several results establish tightness of SDP based relaxations…

The paper models foreign capital inflow from the developed to the developing countries in a stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) framework. Under some regularity conditions, the existence of the solutions to the SDP problem is proved and they are then obtained by numerical technique because of the non-linearity of the …

Study finds the cutoff for exact recovery in Gaussian mixture models.

Maximum A posteriori Probability (MAP) inference in graphical models amounts to solving a graph-structured combinatorial optimization problem. Popular inference algorithms such as belief propagation (BP) and generalized belief propagation (GBP) are intimately related to linear programming (LP) relaxation within the She…

New algorithm optimizes tessellated kernels for larger datasets and improved performance.

New algorithm solves large cardinality-constrained clustering problems.

Classical multidimensional scaling only works well when the noisy distances observed in a high dimensional space can be faithfully represented by Euclidean distances in a low dimensional space. Advanced models such as Maximum Variance Unfolding (MVU) and Minimum Volume Embedding (MVE) use Semi-Definite Programming (SDP…

Conditional Random Fields (CRF) have been widely used in a variety of computer vision tasks. Conventional CRFs typically define edges on neighboring image pixels, resulting in a sparse graph such that efficient inference can be performed. However, these CRFs fail to model long-range contextual relationships. Fully-conn…