EECS260 Optimization (Fall semester 2012): project 3

Project 3 consists of participating in class discussions of several papers that apply optimisation algorithms to specific problems. You should read each paper ahead of time and be prepared to ask questions (or to answer them). The first thing to understand is the optimisation problem, i.e., what the variables are and what the objective function is (and why it makes sense to formulate the problem in that way). Example questions (not all may apply): is the problem constrained/unconstrained/smooth/line-search/trust-region...? If it uses a line search, does it satisfy the Wolfe (or other) conditions? Does the paper use a standard optimisation algorithm, or are there ad-hoc modifications, and if so what are the consequences? Are there better choices of algorithm (take into account ease of implementation, scalability wrt problem size, etc.)? Is the empirical evaluation fair and conclusive (competing methods are often presented at a disadvantage)? What is the stopping condition or convergence criterion? Does the problem have a unique optimum? How important is the optimisation part in the paper's main objectives? Be critical.

• Oct. 3. Presenter: Maksym Vladymyrov.

  • Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á.: "The elastic embedding algorithm for dimensionality reduction". ICML 2010.
  • Vladymyrov, M. and Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á.: "Partial-Hessian strategies for fast learning of nonlinear embeddings". ICML 2012.

• Nov. 7. Presenters: Chengjie Qin and Maksym Vladymyrov.

  • Feng et al.: "Towards a unified architecture for in-RDBMS analytics". SIGMOD 2012.
  • Vladymyrov, M. and Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á.: "Entropic affinities: properties and efficient numerical computation". ICML 2013.

• Nov. 14. Presenter: Weiran Wang.

  • Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á. and Lu, Z.: "Parametric dimensionality reduction by unsupervised regression". CVPR 2010.
  • Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á. and Lu, Z.: "Manifold learning and missing data recovery through unsupervised regression". ICDM 2011.
  • Wang, W. and Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á.: "Nonlinear low-dimensional regression using auxiliary coordinates". AISTATS 2012.

• Nov. 21. Presenters: Sifei Liu, Simon Sáfár, Yi-Hsuan Tsai.

  • Zibulevsky and Elad: "L1-L2 optimization in signal and image processing". IEEE Mag. Sig. Proc. 2010.
  • Yang et al.: "Coupled dictionary training for image super-resolution". IEEE Trans. Image Proc. 2012.

• Nov. 28. Presenters: Shuo Liu and Weiran Wang.

  • Han et al.: "Grasp analysis as linear matrix inequality problems". IEEE Trans. Robotics and Automation 2000.
  • Wang, W. and Carreira-Perpiñán, M. Á.: "The role of dimensionality reduction in classification". AAAI 2014.

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