arXiv research

Local minimizers are convex and close to Wulff shapes.

The paper proves properties of curves in Riemannian manifolds.

The paper finds local minimizers for obstacle avoidance on curved spaces.

New stabilization found in planar elasticae with degenerate diffusion.

We give a locally minimal, but not globally minimal bridge position of a knot, that is, an unstabilized, nonminimal bridge position of a knot. It implies that a bridge position cannot always be simplified so that the bridge number monotonically decreases to the minimal.

Local minimality proven for stable free-boundary minimal hypersurfaces.

Paper shows faster convergence to local-minimizers in over-parametrized models under interpolation-like conditions.

The paper proves an infinite double bubble theorem in higher dimensions.

In this paper we consider $l_0$ regularized convex cone programming problems. In particular, we first propose an iterative hard thresholding (IHT) method and its variant for solving $l_0$ regularized box constrained convex programming. We show that the sequence generated by these methods converges to a local minimizer.…

Many optimization algorithms converge to stationary points. When the underlying problem is nonconvex, they may get trapped at local minimizers and occasionally stagnate near saddle points. We propose the Run-and-Inspect Method, which adds an "inspect" phase to existing algorithms that helps escape from non-global stati…

We prove nonexistence of nonconstant local minimizers for a class of functionals, which typically appears in the scalar two-phase field model, over a smooth N-dimensional Riemannian manifold without boundary with non-negative Ricci curvature. Conversely for a class of surfaces possessing a simple closed geodesic along …

Construct locally minimizing $(1,2)$-clusters with prescribed asymptotic geometry.

Matrix completion has attracted much interest in the past decade in machine learning and computer vision. For low-rank promotion in matrix completion, the nuclear norm penalty is convenient due to its convexity but has a bias problem. Recently, various algorithms using nonconvex penalties have been proposed, among whic…

It is well-known that normal extremals in sub-Riemannian geometry are curves which locally minimize the energy functional. Most proofs of this fact do not make, however, an explicit use of relations between local optimality and the geometry of the problem. In this paper, we provide a new proof of that classical result,…

A lens cluster minimizes perimeter in the plane with given area constraints.

Study minimizes CR surfaces in Heisenberg group with rotational symmetry.

We classify local minimizers of $\intσ_2+\oint H_2$ among all conformally flat metrics in the Euclidean $(n+1)$-ball, $4\leq n\leq 5$, for which the boundary has unit volume, subject to an ellipticity assumption. We also classify local minimizers of the analogous functional in the critical dimension $n+1=4$. If minimiz…

Optimizes the conformal capacity of linked curves in $S^3$.

We show that gradient descent converges to a local minimizer, almost surely with random initialization. This is proved by applying the Stable Manifold Theorem from dynamical systems theory.

We give an example of a codimension-one foliation which is transversely of class C^1 and which does not satisfy the "Local Minimal Set" property.

An embedded cubic graph consisting of segments of geodesics such that the angles at any vertex are equal to $2π/3$ is a closed local minimal net. This net is regular if all segments of geodesics are equal. The problem of classification of closed local minimal nets on surfaces of constant negative curvature has been for…

Study local minimizers of Ginzburg-Landau functionals in high dimensions, showing energy measures converge to rectifiable measures.

Study shows TAP free energy minimization provides better posterior inference in high-dimensional linear models.

The MBO scheme for data clustering is analyzed in the large data limit, proving convergence to optimal partition problems.

Unified approach classifies stable and minimal elastic curves.

We introduce a geometrically transparent strict saddle property for nonsmooth functions. This property guarantees that simple proximal algorithms on weakly convex problems converge only to local minimizers, when randomly initialized. We argue that the strict saddle property may be a realistic assumption in applications…

We consider the problem of finding local minimizers in non-convex and non-smooth optimization. Under the assumption of strict saddle points, positive results have been derived for first-order methods. We present the first known results for the non-smooth case, which requires different analysis and a different algorithm…

We study the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) method in nonconvex optimization problems from the point of view of approximating diffusion processes. We prove rigorously that the diffusion process can approximate the SGD algorithm weakly using the weak form of master equation for probability evolution. In the small ste…

We consider the problem of learning a one-hidden-layer neural network with non-overlapping convolutional layer and ReLU activation, i.e., $f(\mathbf{Z}, \mathbf{w}, \mathbf{a}) = \sum_j a_jσ(\mathbf{w}^T\mathbf{Z}_j)$, in which both the convolutional weights $\mathbf{w}$ and the output weights $\mathbf{a}$ are paramete…

We study nonconvex optimization landscapes for learning overcomplete representations, including learning (i) sparsely used overcomplete dictionaries and (ii) convolutional dictionaries, where these unsupervised learning problems find many applications in high-dimensional data analysis. Despite the empirical success of …

Study variational properties of curves in half-plane with area constraints.

We consider the problem of recovering a complete (i.e., square and invertible) matrix $\mathbf A_0$, from $\mathbf Y \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times p}$ with $\mathbf Y = \mathbf A_0 \mathbf X_0$, provided $\mathbf X_0$ is sufficiently sparse. This recovery problem is central to theoretical understanding of dictionary learnin…

In this paper we consider sparse approximation problems, that is, general $l_0$ minimization problems with the $l_0$-"norm" of a vector being a part of constraints or objective function. In particular, we first study the first-order optimality conditions for these problems. We then propose penalty decomposition (PD) me…

In this note, we focus on smooth nonconvex optimization problems that obey: (1) all local minimizers are also global; and (2) around any saddle point or local maximizer, the objective has a negative directional curvature. Concrete applications such as dictionary learning, generalized phase retrieval, and orthogonal ten…

Significant attention has been given to minimizing a penalized least squares criterion for estimating sparse solutions to large linear systems of equations. The penalty is responsible for inducing sparsity and the natural choice is the so-called $l_0$ norm. In this paper we develop a Momentumized Iterative Shrinkage Th…

We propose $β$-graph embedding for robustly learning feature vectors from data vectors and noisy link weights. A newly introduced empirical moment $β$-score reduces the influence of contamination and robustly measures the difference between the underlying correct expected weights of links and the specified generative m…

The paper analyzes conditions for solving low-rank matrix recovery problems with noisy measurements.

Optical scatterometry is a method to measure the size and shape of periodic micro- or nanostructures on surfaces. For this purpose the geometry parameters of the structures are obtained by reproducing experimental measurement results through numerical simulations. We compare the performance of Bayesian optimization to …

We investigate stability and local minimizing properties of the Riemannian functional defined by the L^p norm of the curvature tensor on the space of Riemannian metrics on a closed manifold. Riemannian metrics with constant curvature and products of such metrics are critical points of this functional. We prove that the…

We introduce a notion of non-local almost minimal boundaries similar to that introduced by Almgren in geometric measure theory. Extending methods developed recently for non-local minimal surfaces we prove that flat non-local almost minimal boundaries are smooth. This can be viewed as a non-local version of the Almgren-…

New parametrizations for minimal timelike surfaces discovered.

We study stability and local minimizing properties of $L^p$- norms of Riemannian curvature tensor denoted by $\mathcal{R}_p$ by variational methods. We compute the Hessian of $\mathcal{R}_p$ at compact rank 1 symmetric spaces and prove that they are stable for $\mathcal{R}_p$ for certain values of p > 2. A similar resu…

Euler's elastica with monotone curvature is uniquely minimal.

Ricci solitons as critical points of quadratic curvature functionals

In this paper we study general Schatten-$p$ quasi-norm (SPQN) regularized matrix minimization problems. In particular, we first introduce a class of first-order stationary points for them, and show that the first-order stationary points introduced in [11] for an SPQN regularized $vector$ minimization problem are equiva…

Study calculates eigenvalues and eigenfunctions for spherical triangles and finds fundamental gap behavior.

Metrics on Lie groupoids and differentiable stacks have been introduced recently, extending the Riemannian geometry of manifolds and orbifolds to more general singular spaces. Here we continue that theory, studying stacky curves on Riemannian stacks, measuring their length using stacky metrics, and introducing stacky g…

We consider the problem of recovering a complete (i.e., square and invertible) matrix $\mathbf A_0$, from $\mathbf Y \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times p}$ with $\mathbf Y = \mathbf A_0 \mathbf X_0$, provided $\mathbf X_0$ is sufficiently sparse. This recovery problem is central to theoretical understanding of dictionary learnin…