We develop new tools to study landscapes in nonconvex optimization. Given one optimization problem, we pair it with another by smoothly parametrizing the domain. This is either for practical purposes (e.g., to use smooth optimization algorithms with good g ...
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 ...
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 ...
Optimization algorithms can see their local convergence rates deteriorate when the Hessian at the optimum is singular. These singularities are inescapable when the optima are non-isolated. Yet, under the right circumstances, several algorithms preserve the ...
Trust-region methods (TR) can converge quadratically to minima where the Hessian is positive definite. However, if the minima are not isolated, then the Hessian there cannot be positive definite. The weaker Polyak–Łojasiewicz (PŁ) condition is compatible w ...
We address the problem of minimizing a smooth function under smooth equality constraints. Under regularity assumptions on these constraints, we propose a notion of approximate first- and second-order critical point which relies on the geometric formalism o ...
A method is proposed to reconstruct the 3D molecular structure from micrographs collected at just one sample tilt angle in the random conical tilt scheme in cryo-electron microscopy. The method uses autocorrelation analysis on the micrographs to estimate f ...
We consider the problem of provably finding a stationary point of a smooth function to be minimized on the variety of bounded-rank matrices. This turns out to be unexpectedly delicate. We trace the difficulty back to a geometric obstacle: On a nonsmooth se ...
Quasi-Newton (qN) techniques approximate the Newton step by estimating the Hessian using the so-called secant equations. Some of these methods compute the Hessian using several secant equations but produce non-symmetric updates. Other quasi-Newton schemes, ...
