The iteratively reweighted l1 algorithm is a widely used method for solving various regularization problems, which generally minimize a differentiable loss function combined with a nonconvex regularizer to induce sparsity in the solution. However, the convergence and the complexity of iteratively reweighted l1 algorithms is generally difficult to analyze, especially for non-Lipschitz differentiable regularizers such as nonconvex lp norm regularization. In this paper, we propose, analyze and test a reweighted l1 algorithm combined with the extrapolation technique under the assumption of Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property on the objective. Unlike existing iteratively reweighted l1 algorithms with extrapolation, our method does not require the Lipschitz differentiability on the regularizers nor the smoothing parameters in the weights bounded away from zero. We show the proposed algorithm converges uniquely to a stationary point of the regularization problem and has local linear complexity--a much stronger result than existing ones. Our numerical experiments show the efficiency of our proposed method.
In this paper, we focus on the local convergence rate analysis of the proximal iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ algorithms for solving $\ell_p$ regularization problems, which are widely applied for inducing sparse solutions. We show that if the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property is satisfied, the algorithm converges to a unique first-order stationary point; furthermore, the algorithm has local linear convergence or local sublinear convergence. The theoretical results we derived are much stronger than the existing results for iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ algorithms.
We propose a new algorithmic framework for constrained compressed sensing models that admit nonconvex sparsity-inducing regularizers including the log-penalty function as objectives, and nonconvex loss functions such as the Cauchy loss function and the Tukey biweight loss function in the constraint. Our framework employs iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ schemes to construct subproblems that can be efficiently solved by well-developed solvers for basis pursuit denoising such as SPGL1 [6]. We propose a new termination criterion for the subproblem solvers that allows them to return an…
Iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ algorithm is a popular algorithm for solving a large class of optimization problems whose objective is the sum of a Lipschitz differentiable loss function and a possibly nonconvex sparsity inducing regularizer. In this paper, motivated by the success of extrapolation techniques in accelerating first-order methods, we study how widely used extrapolation techniques such as those in [4,5,22,28] can be incorporated to possibly accelerate the iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ algorithm. We consider three versions of such algorithms. For each version, we exhibit an expl…
We propose a method, called ACQUIRE, for the solution of constrained optimization problems modeling the restoration of images corrupted by Poisson noise. The objective function is the sum of a generalized Kullback-Leibler divergence term and a TV regularizer, subject to nonnegativity and possibly other constraints, such as flux conservation. ACQUIRE is a line-search method that considers a smoothed version of TV, based on a Huber-like function, and computes the search directions by minimizing quadratic approximations of the problem, built by exploiting some second-order information. A classica…
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Hunan University（湖南大学）
In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex problems with linear constraints appearing frequently in the area of image processing. We solve this problem by the penalty method and propose the iteratively reweighted alternating minimization algorithm. To speed up the algorithm, we also apply the continuation strategy to the penalty parameter. A convergence result is proved for the algorithm. Compared with the nonconvex ADMM, the proposed algorithm enjoys both theoretical and computational advantages like weaker convergence requirements and faster speed. Numerical results demonstrate the effi…
For solving a wide class of nonconvex and nonsmooth problems, we propose a proximal linearized iteratively reweighted least squares (PL-IRLS) algorithm. We first approximate the original problem by smoothing methods, and second write the approximated problem into an auxiliary problem by introducing new variables. PL-IRLS is then built on solving the auxiliary problem by utilizing the proximal linearization technique and the iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) method, and has remarkable computation advantages. We show that PL-IRLS can be extended to solve more general nonconvex and nons…
Efficient Low-rank Identification via Accelerated Iteratively Reweighted Nuclear Norm Minimization
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；Center for Applied Mathematics of Henan Province, Henan University（河南大学河南省应用数学中心）
Alternating Iteratively Reweighted $\ell_1$ and Subspace Newton Algorithms for Nonconvex Sparse Optimization
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Mathematics and Statistics, Henan University（河南大学数学与统计学院）；Center for Applied Mathematics of Henan Province, Henan University（河南大学河南省应用数学中心）
We propose a new Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) algorithm for the problem of completing or denoising low-rank matrices that are structured, e.g., that possess a Hankel, Toeplitz or block-Hankel/Toeplitz structure. The algorithm optimizes an objective based on a non-convex surrogate of the rank by solving a sequence of quadratic problems. Our strategy combines computational efficiency, as it operates on a lower dimensional generator space of the structured matrices, with high statistical accuracy which can be observed in experiments on hard estimation and completion tasks. Our expe…
IIT Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；Microsoft Research India（微软印度研究院）
We provide the first global model recovery results for the IRLS (iteratively reweighted least squares) heuristic for robust regression problems. IRLS is known to offer excellent performance, despite bad initializations and data corruption, for several parameter estimation problems. Existing analyses of IRLS frequently require careful initialization, thus offering only local convergence guarantees. We remedy this by proposing augmentations to the basic IRLS routine that not only offer guaranteed global recovery, but in practice also outperform state-of-the-art algorithms for robust regression. …
Recovering Simultaneously Structured Data via Non-Convex Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares
University of North Carolina at Charlotte（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校）；Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München（慕尼黑大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning (MCML)（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
The log-sum penalty is often adopted as a replacement for the $\ell_0$ pseudo-norm in compressive sensing and low-rank optimization. The hard-thresholding operator, i.e., the proximity operator of the $\ell_0$ penalty, plays an essential role in applications; similarly, we require an efficient method for evaluating the proximity operator of the log-sum penalty. Due to the nonconvexity of this function, its proximity operator is commonly computed through the iteratively reweighted $\ell_1$ method, which replaces the log-sum term with its first-order approximation. This paper reports that the pr…
Iteratively Linearized Reweighted Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for a Class of Nonconvex Problems
Department of Mathematics, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学数学系）；College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学计算机学院）；The State Key Laboratory for High Performance Computation, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学高性能计算国家重点实验室）；Hunan Key Laboratory for Computation and Simulation in Science and Engineering, School of Mathematics and Computational Science, Xiangtan University（湖南计算与模拟科学工程重点实验室，湘潭大学数学与计算科学学院）
Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；KU Eichstätt–Ingolstadt（埃希施泰特-英戈尔施塔特天主教大学）
The recovery of sparse data is at the core of many applications in machine learning and signal processing. While such problems can be tackled using $\ell_1$-regularization as in the LASSO estimator and in the Basis Pursuit approach, specialized algorithms are typically required to solve the corresponding high-dimensional non-smooth optimization for large instances. Iteratively Reweighted Least Squares (IRLS) is a widely used algorithm for this purpose due its excellent numerical performance. However, while existing theory is able to guarantee convergence of this algorithm to the minimizer, it …
The affine rank minimization (ARM) problem is well known for both its applications and the fact that it is NP-hard. One of the most successful approaches, yet arguably underrepresented, is iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS), more specifically $\mathrm{IRLS}$-$0$. Despite comprehensive empirical evidence that it overall outperforms nuclear norm minimization and related methods, it is still not understood to a satisfying degree. In particular, the significance of a slow decrease of the therein appearing regularization parameter denoted $γ$ poses interesting questions. While commonly equ…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）
We propose a general framework of iteratively reweighted l1 methods for solving lp regularization problems. We prove that after some iteration k, the iterates generated by the proposed methods have the same support and sign as the limit points, and are bounded away from 0, so that the algorithm behaves like solving a smooth problem in the reduced space. As a result, the global convergence can be easily obtained and an update strategy for the smoothing parameter is proposed which can automatically terminate the updates for zero components. We show that lp regularization problems are locally equ…
Avoiding strict saddle points of nonconvex regularized problems
School of Information Science and Technology, ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学信息科学与技术学院）；School of Mathematical Sciences, Shenzhen University（深圳大学数学科学学院）；Department of Applied Mathematics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学应用数学系）
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shenzhen University（深圳大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）
We propose a general formulation of nonconvex and nonsmooth sparse optimization problems with convex set constraint, which can take into account most existing types of nonconvex sparsity-inducing terms, bringing strong applicability to a wide range of applications. We design a general algorithmic framework of iteratively reweighted algorithms for solving the proposed nonconvex and nonsmooth sparse optimization problems, which solves a sequence of weighted convex regularization problems with adaptively updated weights. First-order optimality condition is derived and global convergence results a…
Sparsity is one of the key concepts that allows the recovery of signals that are subsampled at a rate significantly lower than required by the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. Our proposed framework uses arbitrary multiscale transforms, such as those build upon wavelets or shearlets, as a sparsity promoting prior which allow to decompose the image into different scales such that image features can be optimally extracted. In order to further exploit the sparsity of the recovered signal we combine the method of reweighted $\ell^1$, introduced by Candès et al., with iteratively updated weights a…
Rank minimization is of interest in machine learning applications such as recommender systems and robust principal component analysis. Minimizing the convex relaxation to the rank minimization problem, the nuclear norm, is an effective technique to solve the problem with strong performance guarantees. However, nonconvex relaxations have less estimation bias than the nuclear norm and can more accurately reduce the effect of noise on the measurements. We develop efficient algorithms based on iteratively reweighted nuclear norm schemes, while also utilizing the low rank factorization for semidefi…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
This paper investigates the optimality conditions for characterizing the local minimizers of the constrained optimization problems involving an $\ell_p$ norm ($0<p<1$) of the variables, which may appear in either the objective or the constraint. This kind of problems have strong applicability to a wide range of areas since usually the $\ell_p$ norm can promote sparse solutions. However, the nonsmooth and non-Lipschtiz nature of the $\ell_p$ norm often cause these problems difficult to analyze and solve. We provide the calculation of the subgradients of the $\ell_p$ norm and the normal cones of…
