Transforming into an exact penalty function model with convex compact constraints yields efficient infeasible approaches for optimization problems with orthogonality constraints. For smooth and $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularized cases, these infeasible approaches adopt simple and orthonormalization-free updating scheme and show their high efficiency in the test examples. However, to avoid orthonormalization while enforcing the feasibility of the final solution, these infeasible approaches introduce a quadratic penalty term, where an inappropriate penalty parameter can lead to numerical inefficiency. Inspired by penalty-free approaches for smooth optimization problems, we proposed a proximal first-order algorithm for a class of optimization problems with orthogonality constraints and nonsmooth regularization term. The consequent algorithm, named sequential linearized proximal gradient method (SLPG), alternatively takes tangential steps and normal steps to improve the optimality and feasibility respectively. In SLPG, the orthonormalization process is invoked only once at the last step if high precision in feasibility is needed, showing that main iterations in SLPG are orthonormalization-free. Besides, both the tangential steps and normal steps do not involve the penalty parameter, and thus SLPG is penalty-free and avoids the inefficiency by inappropriate penalty parameter. We analyze the global convergence properties of SLPG where the tangential steps are inexactly computed. By inexactly computing tangential steps, for smooth cases and $\ell_{2,1}$-norm regularized cases, SLPG has a closed-form updating scheme, which leads to its cheap tangential steps. Numerical experiments illustrate the numerical advantages of SLPG when compared with existing first-order methods.
This paper focus on the minimization of a possibly nonsmooth objective function over the Stiefel manifold. The existing approaches either lack efficiency or can only tackle prox-friendly objective functions. We propose a constraint dissolving function named NCDF and show that it has the same first-order stationary points and local minimizers as the original problem in a neighborhood of the Stiefel manifold. Furthermore, we show that the Clarke subdifferential of NCDF is easy to achieve from the Clarke subdifferential of the objective function. Therefore, various existing approaches for unconst…
We consider a class of nonsmooth and nonconvex optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold where the objective function is the summation of a nonconvex smooth function and a nonsmooth Lipschitz continuous convex function composed with an linear mapping. We propose three numerical algorithms for solving this problem, by combining smoothing methods and some existing algorithms for smooth optimization over the Stiefel manifold. In particular, we approximate the aforementioned nonsmooth convex function by its Moreau envelope in our smoothing methods, and prove that the Moreau envelope has many…
We consider optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold whose objective function is the summation of a smooth function and a nonsmooth function. Existing methods for solving this kind of problems can be classified into three classes. Algorithms in the first class rely on information of the subgradients of the objective function and thus tend to converge slowly in practice. Algorithms in the second class are proximal point algorithms, which involve subproblems that can be as difficult as the original problem. Algorithms in the third class are based on operator-splitting techniques, but they…
The University of Iowa（爱荷华大学）；University of California（加利福尼亚大学）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）
Riemannian optimization has drawn a lot of attention due to its wide applications in practice. Riemannian stochastic first-order algorithms have been studied in the literature to solve large-scale machine learning problems over Riemannian manifolds. However, most of the existing Riemannian stochastic algorithms require the objective function to be differentiable, and they do not apply to the case where the objective function is nonsmooth. In this paper, we present two Riemannian stochastic proximal gradient methods for minimizing nonsmooth function over the Stiefel manifold. The two methods, n…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Cainiao Network（菜鸟网络）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；University of Denver（丹佛大学）
We consider a class of nonsmooth optimization problems over the Stiefel manifold, in which the objective function is weakly convex in the ambient Euclidean space. Such problems are ubiquitous in engineering applications but still largely unexplored. We present a family of Riemannian subgradient-type methods -- namely Riemannain subgradient, incremental subgradient, and stochastic subgradient methods -- to solve these problems and show that they all have an iteration complexity of ${\cal O}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ for driving a natural stationarity measure below $\varepsilon$. In addition, we establ…
We propose a new subgradient method for the minimization of nonsmooth convex functions over a convex set. To speed up computations we use adaptive approximate projections only requiring to move within a certain distance of the exact projections (which decreases in the course of the algorithm). In particular, the iterates in our method can be infeasible throughout the whole procedure. Nevertheless, we provide conditions which ensure convergence to an optimal feasible point under suitable assumptions. One convergence result deals with step size sequences that are fixed a priori. Two other result…
We consider the problem of minimizing a non-convex function over a smooth manifold $\mathcal{M}$. We propose a novel algorithm, the Orthogonal Directions Constrained Gradient Method (ODCGM) which only requires computing a projection onto a vector space. ODCGM is infeasible but the iterates are constantly pulled towards the manifold, ensuring the convergence of ODCGM towards $\mathcal{M}$. ODCGM is much simpler to implement than the classical methods which require the computation of a retraction. Moreover, we show that ODCGM exhibits the near-optimal oracle complexities $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsil…
Primal-Dual Methods for Nonsmooth Nonconvex Optimization with Orthogonality Constraints
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院H. Milton Stewart工业与系统工程系）；Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学系统工程与工程管理系）
In this paper, we analyze the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing a nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth objective function, $ϕ(x_0,\ldots,x_p,y)$, subject to coupled linear equality constraints. Our ADMM updates each of the primal variables $x_0,\ldots,x_p,y$, followed by updating the dual variable. We separate the variable $y$ from $x_i$'s as it has a special role in our analysis. The developed convergence guarantee covers a variety of nonconvex functions such as piecewise linear functions, $\ell_q$ quasi-norm, Schatten-$q$ quasi-norm ($0<q<1$), m…
Community detection plays an important role in understanding and exploiting the structure of complex systems. Many algorithms have been developed for community detection using modularity maximization or other techniques. In this paper, we formulate the community detection problem as a constrained nonsmooth optimization problem on the compact Stiefel manifold. A Riemannian projected proximal gradient method is proposed and used to solve the problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to use Riemannian optimization for community detection problem. Numerical experimental resu…
Enhancing Distributional Robustness in Principal Component Analysis by Wasserstein Distances
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）；Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science（数学系统科学研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Proximal gradient method has been playing an important role to solve many machine learning tasks, especially for the nonsmooth problems. However, in some machine learning problems such as the bandit model and the black-box learning problem, proximal gradient method could fail because the explicit gradients of these problems are difficult or infeasible to obtain. The gradient-free (zeroth-order) method can address these problems because only the objective function values are required in the optimization. Recently, the first zeroth-order proximal stochastic algorithm was proposed to solve the no…
University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；Texas A&M University（得克萨斯农工大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
Spectral clustering is one of the fundamental unsupervised learning methods widely used in data analysis. Sparse spectral clustering (SSC) imposes sparsity to the spectral clustering and it improves the interpretability of the model. This paper considers a widely adopted model for SSC, which can be formulated as an optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold with nonsmooth and nonconvex objective. Such an optimization problem is very challenging to solve. Existing methods usually solve its convex relaxation or need to smooth its nonsmooth part using certain smoothing techniques. In this pap…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学）；JD Finance America Corporation（京东金融美国公司）
Alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is a popular optimization tool for the composite and constrained problems in machine learning. However, in many machine learning problems such as black-box attacks and bandit feedback, ADMM could fail because the explicit gradients of these problems are difficult or infeasible to obtain. Zeroth-order (gradient-free) methods can effectively solve these problems due to that the objective function values are only required in the optimization. Recently, though there exist a few zeroth-order ADMM methods, they build on the convexity of objective fu…
This work introduces the StoMADS-PB algorithm for constrained stochastic blackbox optimization, which is an extension of the mesh adaptive direct-search (MADS) method originally developed for deterministic blackbox optimization under general constraints. The values of the objective and constraint functions are provided by a noisy blackbox, i.e., they can only be computed with random noise whose distribution is unknown. As in MADS, constraint violations are aggregated into a single constraint violation function. Since all functions values are numerically unavailable, StoMADS-PB uses estimates a…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex function over the intersection of finitely many simple sets which are easy to project onto. This is an important problem arising in various domains such as machine learning. The main difficulty lies in finding the projection of a point in the intersection of many sets. Existing approaches yield an infeasible point with an iteration-complexity of $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$ for nonsmooth problems with no guarantees on the in-feasibility. By reformulating the problem through exact penalty functions, we derive first-order algorithms which not only guarantee…
In this paper we consider a class of structured nonsmooth difference-of-convex (DC) constrained DC program in which the first convex component of the objective and constraints is the sum of a smooth and nonsmooth functions while their second convex component is the supremum of finitely many convex smooth functions. The existing methods for this problem usually have a weak convergence guarantee or require a feasible initial point. Inspired by the recent work (Math Oper. Res. 42(1):95--118, 2017 by Pang et al.), in this paper we propose two infeasible methods with strong convergence guarantee fo…
Texas A&M University（德克萨斯A&M大学）；Cainiao Network（菜鸟网络）；University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
We consider the problem of maximizing the $\ell_1$ norm of a linear map over the sphere, which arises in various machine learning applications such as orthogonal dictionary learning (ODL) and robust subspace recovery (RSR). The problem is numerically challenging due to its nonsmooth objective and nonconvex constraint, and its algorithmic aspects have not been well explored. In this paper, we show how the manifold structure of the sphere can be exploited to design fast algorithms for tackling this problem. Specifically, our contribution is threefold. First, we present a manifold proximal point …
