Publications by Quoc Tran Dinh

A Newton Frank-Wolfe method for constrained self-concordant minimization

We develop a new Newton Frank-Wolfe algorithm to solve a class of constrained self-concordant minimization problems using linear minimization oracles (LMO). Unlike L-smooth convex functions, where the Lipschitz continuity of the objective gradient holds gl ...

SPRINGER2022

An adaptive primal-dual framework for nonsmooth convex minimization

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Ahmet Alacaoglu

We propose a new self-adaptive and double-loop smoothing algorithm to solve composite, nonsmooth, and constrained convex optimization problems. Our algorithm is based on Nesterov’s smoothing technique via general Bregman distance functions. It self-adaptiv ...

2020

Chemical machine learning with kernels: The impact of loss functions

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Sandip De, Junhong Lin, Van Quang Nguyen

Machine learning promises to accelerate materials discovery by allowing computational efficient property predictions from a small number of reference calculations. As a result, the literature has spent a considerable effort in designing representations tha ...

2019

A single-phase, proximal path-following framework

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Anastasios Kyrillidis

We propose a new proximal, path-following framework for a class of---possibly non-smooth---constrained convex problems. We consider settings where the non-smooth part is endowed with a proximity operator, and the constraint set is equipped with a self-conc ...

INFORMS2018

A Smooth Primal-Dual Optimization Framework for Nonsmooth Composite Convex Minimization

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh

We propose a new and low per-iteration complexity first-order primal-dual optimization framework for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel combination of three classic ideas applied to the primal-dual gap fu ...

SIAM2018

Smooth Primal-Dual Coordinate Descent Algorithms for Nonsmooth Convex Optimization

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Ahmet Alacaoglu

We propose a new randomized coordinate descent method for a convex optimization template with broad applications. Our analysis relies on a novel combination of four ideas applied to the primal-dual gap function: smoothing, acceleration, homotopy, and coord ...

2017

Frank-Wolfe Works for Non-Lipschitz Continuous Gradient Objectives: Scalable Poisson Phase Retrieval

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Alp Yurtsever, Yen-Huan Li, Ya-Ping Hsieh, Marwa El Halabi, Gergely Odor

We study a phase retrieval problem in the Poisson noise model. Motivated by the PhaseLift approach, we approximate the maximum-likelihood estimator by solving a convex program with a nuclear norm constraint. While the Frank-Wolfe algorithm, together with t ...

Ieee2016

Convex block-sparse linear regression with expanders - provably

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Anastasios Kyrillidis, Luca Baldassarre, Bubacarr Bah

Sparse matrices are favorable objects in machine learning and optimization. When such matrices are used, in place of dense ones, the overall complexity requirements in optimization can be significantly reduced in practice, both in terms of space and run-ti ...

2016

Composite convex minimization involving self-concordant-like cost functions

Volkan Cevher, Quoc Tran Dinh, Yen-Huan Li

The self-concordant-like property of a smooth convex func- tion is a new analytical structure that generalizes the self-concordant notion. While a wide variety of important applications feature the self- concordant-like property, this concept has heretofor ...

2015

A Primal-dual Framework For Mixtures Of Regularisers

Volkan Cevher, Cosimo Aprile, Quoc Tran Dinh, Luca Baldassarre, Baran Gözcü

Effectively solving many inverse problems in engineering requires to leverage all possible prior information about the structure of the signal to be estimated. This often leads to tackling constrained optimization problems with mixtures of regularizers. Pr ...

2015