Publications related to Combinatorial Penalties: Which structures are preserved by convex relaxations?

The complexity of quantum support vector machines

Quantum support vector machines employ quantum circuits to define the kernel function. It has been shown that this approach offers a provable exponential speedup compared to any known classical algorithm for certain data sets. The training of such models c ...

Verein Forderung Open Access Publizierens Quantenwissenschaf2024

BENIGN LANDSCAPES OF LOW-DIMENSIONAL RELAXATIONS FOR ORTHOGONAL SYNCHRONIZATION ON GENERAL GRAPHS

Nicolas Boumal

Orthogonal group synchronization is the problem of estimating n elements Z(1),& mldr;,Z(n) from the rxr orthogonal group given some relative measurements R-ij approximate to Z(i)Z(j)(-1). The least-squares formulation is nonconvex. To avoid its local minim ...

Siam Publications2024

Optimization Algorithms for Decentralized, Distributed and Collaborative Machine Learning

Anastasiia Koloskova

Distributed learning is the key for enabling training of modern large-scale machine learning models, through parallelising the learning process. Collaborative learning is essential for learning from privacy-sensitive data that is distributed across various ...

EPFL2024

Safe Zeroth-Order Convex Optimization Using Quadratic Local Approximations

Baiwei Guo, Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate, Yuning Jiang, Maryam Kamgarpour

We address black-box convex optimization problems, where the objective and constraint functions are not explicitly known but can be sampled within the feasible set. The challenge is thus to generate a sequence of feasible points converging towards an optim ...

IEEE2023

Augmented Lagrangian Methods for Provable and Scalable Machine Learning

Mehmet Fatih Sahin

Non-convex constrained optimization problems have become a powerful framework for modeling a wide range of machine learning problems, with applications in k-means clustering, large- scale semidefinite programs (SDPs), and various other tasks. As the perfor ...

EPFL2023

A Spatial Branch and Bound Algorithm for Continuous Pricing with Advanced Discrete Choice Demand Modeling

Michel Bierlaire

In this paper, we present a spatial branch and bound algorithm to tackle the continuous pricing problem, where demand is captured by an advanced discrete choice model (DCM). Advanced DCMs, like mixed logit or latent class models, are capable of modeling de ...

2023

Universal and adaptive methods for robust stochastic optimization

Ali Kavis

Within the context of contemporary machine learning problems, efficiency of optimization process depends on the properties of the model and the nature of the data available, which poses a significant problem as the complexity of either increases ad infinit ...

EPFL2023

Quality-Constrained Encoding Optimization for Omnidirectional Video Streaming

Pascal Frossard, Roberto Gerson De Albuquerque Azevedo, Chaofan He

Omnidirectional video streaming is usually implemented based on the representations of tiles, where the tiles are obtained by splitting the video frame into several rectangular areas and each tile is converted into multiple representations with different r ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2023

Data-Driven Control and Optimization under Noisy and Uncertain Conditions

Baiwei Guo

Control systems operating in real-world environments often face disturbances arising from measurement noise and model mismatch. These factors can significantly impact the perfor- mance and safety of the system. In this thesis, we aim to leverage data to de ...

EPFL2023

Neural Set Function Extensions: Learning with Discrete Functions in High Dimensions

Andreas Loukas, Nikolaos Karalias

Integrating functions on discrete domains into neural networks is key to developing their capability to reason about discrete objects. But, discrete domains are (I) not naturally amenable to gradient-based optimization, and (II) incompatible with deep lear ...

2022

Predicting in Uncertain Environments: Methods for Robust Machine Learning

Paul Thierry Yves Rolland

One of the main goal of Artificial Intelligence is to develop models capable of providing valuable predictions in real-world environments. In particular, Machine Learning (ML) seeks to design such models by learning from examples coming from this same envi ...

EPFL2022

Utility/privacy trade-off as regularized optimal transport

Etienne Patrice Boursier

Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information by taking full advant ...

SPRINGER HEIDELBERG2022

Vehicle-to-Grid for Reliable Frequency Regulation

Dirk Lauinger

Future low-carbon societies will need to store vast amounts of electricity to stabilize electricity grids and to power electric vehicles. Vehicle-to-grid allows vehicle owners and grid operators to share the costs of electricity storage by making the batte ...

EPFL2022

An Accelerated First-Order Method for Non-convex Optimization on Manifolds

Nicolas Boumal, Christopher Arnold Criscitiello

We describe the first gradient methods on Riemannian manifolds to achieve accelerated rates in the non-convex case. Under Lipschitz assumptions on the Riemannian gradient and Hessian of the cost function, these methods find approximate first-order critical ...

SPRINGER2022

Learning of Continuous and Piecewise-Linear Functions With Hessian Total-Variation Regularization

Michaël Unser, Joaquim Gonçalves Garcia Barreto Campos, Shayan Aziznejad

We develop a novel 2D functional learning framework that employs a sparsity-promoting regularization based on second-order derivatives. Motivated by the nature of the regularizer, we restrict the search space to the span of piecewise-linear box splines shi ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2022

Adaptation in Stochastic Algorithms: From Nonsmooth Optimization to Min-Max Problems and Beyond

Ahmet Alacaoglu

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and randomized coordinate descent (RCD) are two of the workhorses for training modern automated decision systems. Intriguingly, convergence properties of these methods are not well-established as we move away from the spec ...

EPFL2021

A first-order primal-dual method with adaptivity to local smoothness

Volkan Cevher, Maria-Luiza Vladarean

We consider the problem of finding a saddle point for the convex-concave objective

\min_x \max_y f(x) + \langle Ax, y\rangle - g^*(y)

, where

f

is a convex function with locally Lipschitz gradient and

g

is convex and possibly non-smooth. We propose an ...

2021

Convex optimization in sums of Banach spaces

Michaël Unser, Shayan Aziznejad

We characterize the solution of a broad class of convex optimization problems that address the reconstruction of a function from a finite number of linear measurements. The underlying hypothesis is that the solution is decomposable as a finite sum of compo ...

2021

A Unified Theory of Robust and Distributionally Robust Optimization via the Primal-Worst-Equals-Dual-Best Principle

Daniel Kuhn, Wolfram Wiesemann, Jianzhe Zhen

Robust and distributionally robust optimization are modeling paradigms for decision-making under uncertainty where the uncertain parameters are only known to reside in an uncertainty set or are governed by any probability distribution from within an ambigu ...

2023

KPC: Learning-Based Model Predictive Control with Deterministic Guarantees

Colin Neil Jones, Emilio Maddalena, Paul Scharnhorst, Yuning Jiang

We propose Kernel Predictive Control (KPC), a learning-based predictive control strategy that enjoys deterministic guarantees of safety. Noise-corrupted samples of the unknown system dynamics are used to learn several models through the formalism of non-pa ...

2021