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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ramachandran, Akshay, Shu, Kevin, Wang, Alex L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.08596
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Table of Contents:
  • This paper studies hidden convexity properties associated with constrained optimization problems over the set of rotation matrices $\text{SO}(n)$. Such problems are nonconvex due to the constraint $X \in \text{SO}(n)$. Nonetheless, we show that certain linear images of $\text{SO}(n)$ are convex, opening up the possibility for convex optimization algorithms with provable guarantees for these problems. Our main technical contributions show that any two-dimensional image of $\text{SO}(n)$ is convex and that the projection of $\text{SO}(n)$ onto its strict upper triangular entries is convex. These results allow us to construct exact convex reformulations for constrained optimization problems over $\text{SO}(n)$ with a single constraint or with constraints defined by low-rank matrices. Both of these results are optimal in a formal sense.