We propose a new approach to perform the boosted difference of convex functions algorithm (BDCA) on non-smooth and non-convex problems involving the difference of convex (DC) functions. The recently proposed BDCA uses an extrapolation step from the point computed by the classical DC algorithm (DCA) via a line search procedure in a descent direction to get an additional decrease of the objective function and accelerate the convergence of DCA. However, when the first function in DC decomposition is non-smooth, the direction computed by BDCA can be ascent and a monotone line search cannot be performed. In this work, we proposed a monotone improved boosted difference of convex functions algorithm (IBDCA) for certain types of non-smooth DC programs, namely those that can be formulated as the difference of a possibly non-smooth function and a smooth one. We show that any cluster point of the sequence generated by IBDCA is a critical point of the problem under consideration and that the corresponding objective value is monotonically decreasing and convergent. We also present the global convergence and the convergent rate under the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz property. The applications of IBDCA in image recovery show the effectiveness of our proposed method. The corresponding numerical experiments demonstrate that our IBDCA outperforms DCA and other state-of-the-art DC methods in both computational time and number of iterations.
University of Alicante（阿利坎特大学）；University of Vienna（维也纳大学）
The Boosted Difference of Convex functions Algorithm (BDCA) was recently proposed for minimizing smooth difference of convex (DC) functions. BDCA accelerates the convergence of the classical Difference of Convex functions Algorithm (DCA) thanks to an additional line search step. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to show that this scheme can be generalized and successfully applied to certain types of nonsmooth DC functions, namely, those that can be expressed as the difference of a smooth function and a possibly nonsmooth one. Secondly, to show that there is complete freedom in the…
A tensor nuclear norm (TNN) based method for solving the tensor recovery problem was recently proposed, and it has achieved state-of-the-art performance. However, it may fail to produce a highly accurate solution since it tends to treats each frontal slice and each rank component of each frontal slice equally. In order to get a recovery with high accuracy, we propose a general and flexible rank relaxation function named double weighted nonconvex nonsmooth rank (DWNNR) relaxation function for efficiently solving the third order tensor recovery problem. The DWNNR relaxation function can be deriv…
Structured convex optimization problems typically involve a mix of smooth and nonsmooth functions. The common practice is to activate the smooth functions via their gradient and the nonsmooth ones via their proximity operator. We show that, although intuitively natural, this approach is not necessarily the most efficient numerically and that, in particular, activating all the functions proximally may be advantageous. To make this viewpoint viable computationally, we derive a number of new examples of proximity operators of smooth convex functions arising in applications. A novel variational mo…
The task of recovering a low-rank matrix from its noisy linear measurements plays a central role in computational science. Smooth formulations of the problem often exhibit an undesirable phenomenon: the condition number, classically defined, scales poorly with the dimension of the ambient space. In contrast, we here show that in a variety of concrete circumstances, nonsmooth penalty formulations do not suffer from the same type of ill-conditioning. Consequently, standard algorithms for nonsmooth optimization, such as subgradient and prox-linear methods, converge at a rapid dimension-independen…
Under consideration are multicomponent minimization problems involving a separable nonsmooth convex function penalizing the components individually, and nonsmooth convex coupling terms penalizing linear mixtures of the components. We investigate block-activated proximal algorithms for solving such problems, i.e., algorithms which, at each iteration, need to use only a block of the underlying functions, as opposed to all of them as in standard methods. For smooth coupling functions, several block-activated algorithms exist and they are well understood. By contrast, in the fully nonsmooth case, …
In this paper, we focus on the problem of minimizing the sum of a nonconvex differentiable function and a DC (Difference of Convex functions) function, where the differentiable function is not restricted to the global Lipschitz gradient continuity assumption. This problem covers a broad range of applications in machine learning and statistics such as compressed sensing, signal recovery, sparse dictionary learning, and matrix factorization, etc. We take inspiration from the Nesterov's acceleration technique and the DC algorithm to develop a novel algorithm for the considered problem. Analyzing …
A refined convergence analysis of pDCA$_e$ with applications to simultaneous sparse recovery and outlier detection
We consider the problem of minimizing a difference-of-convex (DC) function, which can be written as the sum of a smooth convex function with Lipschitz gradient, a proper closed convex function and a continuous possibly nonsmooth concave function . We refine the convergence analysis in [38] for the proximal DC algorithm with extrapolation (pDCA $_e$ ) and show that the whole sequence generated by the algorithm is convergent when the objective is level-bounded, { \em without} imposing differentiability assumptions in the concave part. Our analysis is based on a new potential function and we assu…
This paper is concerned with the factorization form of the rank regularized loss minimization problem. To cater for the scenario in which only a coarse estimation is available for the rank of the true matrix, an $\ell_{2,0}$-norm regularized term is added to the factored loss function to reduce the rank adaptively; and account for the ambiguities in the factorization, a balanced term is then introduced. For the least squares loss, under a restricted condition number assumption on the sampling operator, we establish the KL property of exponent $1/2$ of the nonsmooth factored composite function …
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology（以色列理工学院）
We consider convex optimization problems which are widely used as convex relaxations for low-rank matrix recovery problems. In particular, in several important problems, such as phase retrieval and robust PCA, the underlying assumption in many cases is that the optimal solution is rank-one. In this paper we consider a simple and natural sufficient condition on the objective so that the optimal solution to these relaxations is indeed unique and rank-one. Mainly, we show that under this condition, the standard Frank-Wolfe method with line-search (i.e., without any tuning of parameters whatsoever…
The Mean-Variance-Skewness-Kurtosis (MVSK) portfolio optimization model is a quartic nonconvex polynomial minimization problem over a polytope, which can be formulated as a Difference-of-Convex (DC) program. In this manuscript, we investigate four DC programming approaches for solving the MVSK model. First, two DC formulations based on the projective DC decomposition and the Difference-of-Convex-Sums-of-Squares (DC-SOS) decomposition are established, where the second one is novel. Then, DCA is applied to solve these DC formulations. The convergence analysis of DCA for the MVSK model is establi…
Many problems in data science can be treated as estimating a low-rank matrix from highly incomplete, sometimes even corrupted, observations. One popular approach is to resort to matrix factorization, where the low-rank matrix factors are optimized via first-order methods over a smooth loss function, such as the residual sum of squares. While tremendous progresses have been made in recent years, the natural smooth formulation suffers from two sources of ill-conditioning, where the iteration complexity of gradient descent scales poorly both with the dimension as well as the condition number of t…
Stochastic (sub)gradient methods require step size schedule tuning to perform well in practice. Classical tuning strategies decay the step size polynomially and lead to optimal sublinear rates on (strongly) convex problems. An alternative schedule, popular in nonconvex optimization, is called \emph{geometric step decay} and proceeds by halving the step size after every few epochs. In recent work, geometric step decay was shown to improve exponentially upon classical sublinear rates for the class of \emph{sharp} convex functions. In this work, we ask whether geometric step decay similarly impro…
For nonconvex and nonsmooth restoration models, the lower bound theory reveals their good edge recovery ability, and related analysis can help to design convergent algorithms. Existing such discussions are focused on isotropic regularization models, or only the lower bound theory of anisotropic model with a quadratic fidelity. In this paper, we consider a general image recovery model with a non-Lipschitz anisotropic composite regularization term and an $\ell_q$ norm ($1\leq q<+\infty$) data fidelity term. We establish the lower bound theory for the anisotropic model with an $\ell_1$ fidelity, …
In this paper, we propose two novel non-stationary first-order primal-dual algorithms to solve nonsmooth composite convex optimization problems. Unlike existing primal-dual schemes where the parameters are often fixed, our methods use pre-defined and dynamic sequences for parameters. We prove that our first algorithm can achieve $\mathcal{O}(1/k)$ convergence rate on the primal-dual gap, and primal and dual objective residuals, where $k$ is the iteration counter. Our rate is on the non-ergodic (i.e., the last iterate) sequence of the primal problem and on the ergodic (i.e., the averaging) sequ…
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…
