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Main Authors: Wang, Po-Wei, Chang, Wei-Cheng, Kolter, J. Zico
Format: Preprint
Published: 2017
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00476
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author Wang, Po-Wei
Chang, Wei-Cheng
Kolter, J. Zico
author_facet Wang, Po-Wei
Chang, Wei-Cheng
Kolter, J. Zico
contents In this paper, we propose a low-rank coordinate descent approach to structured semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints. The approach, which we call the Mixing method, is extremely simple to implement, has no free parameters, and typically attains an order of magnitude or better improvement in optimization performance over the current state of the art. We show that the method is strictly decreasing, converges to a critical point, and further that for sufficient rank all non-optimal critical points are unstable. Moreover, we prove that with a step size, the Mixing method converges to the global optimum of the semidefinite program almost surely in a locally linear rate under random initialization. This is the first low-rank semidefinite programming method that has been shown to achieve a global optimum on the spherical manifold without assumption. We apply our algorithm to two related domains: solving the maximum cut semidefinite relaxation, and solving a maximum satisfiability relaxation (we also briefly consider additional applications such as learning word embeddings). In all settings, we demonstrate substantial improvement over the existing state of the art along various dimensions, and in total, this work expands the scope and scale of problems that can be solved using semidefinite programming methods.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_1706_00476
institution arXiv
publishDate 2017
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Mixing method: low-rank coordinate descent for semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints
Wang, Po-Wei
Chang, Wei-Cheng
Kolter, J. Zico
Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
In this paper, we propose a low-rank coordinate descent approach to structured semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints. The approach, which we call the Mixing method, is extremely simple to implement, has no free parameters, and typically attains an order of magnitude or better improvement in optimization performance over the current state of the art. We show that the method is strictly decreasing, converges to a critical point, and further that for sufficient rank all non-optimal critical points are unstable. Moreover, we prove that with a step size, the Mixing method converges to the global optimum of the semidefinite program almost surely in a locally linear rate under random initialization. This is the first low-rank semidefinite programming method that has been shown to achieve a global optimum on the spherical manifold without assumption. We apply our algorithm to two related domains: solving the maximum cut semidefinite relaxation, and solving a maximum satisfiability relaxation (we also briefly consider additional applications such as learning word embeddings). In all settings, we demonstrate substantial improvement over the existing state of the art along various dimensions, and in total, this work expands the scope and scale of problems that can be solved using semidefinite programming methods.
title The Mixing method: low-rank coordinate descent for semidefinite programming with diagonal constraints
topic Optimization and Control
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.00476