We consider the problem of minimizing the continuous valued total variation subject to different unary terms on trees and propose fast direct algorithms based on dynamic programming to solve these problems. We treat both the convex and the non-convex case and derive worst case complexities that are equal or better than existing methods. We show applications to total variation based 2D image processing and computer vision problems based on a Lagrangian decomposition approach. The resulting algorithms are very efficient, offer a high degree of parallelism and come along with memory requirements which are only in the order of the number of image pixels.
For the problem with piecewise-linear unaries @math the best known complexity was @math , which is achieved either by Hochbaum's method (as discussed earlier), or by the method in @cite_12 . We improve this to @math .
@cite_12
2473549844 2029308360 2034380011 2343345052
We consider the adversarial convex bandit problem and we build the first @math -time algorithm with @math -regret for this problem. To do so we introduce three new ideas in the derivative-free optimization literature: (i) kernel methods, (ii) a generalization of Bernoulli convolutions, and (iii) a new annealing schedule for exponential weights (with increasing learning rate). The basic version of our algorithm achieves @math -regret, and we show that a simple variant of this algorithm can be run in @math -time per step at the cost of an additional @math factor in the regret. These results improve upon the @math -regret and @math -time result of the first two authors, and the @math -regret and @math -time result of Hazan and Li. Furthermore we conjecture that another variant of the algorithm could achieve @math -regret, and moreover that this regret is unimprovable (the current best lower bound being @math and it is achieved with linear functions). For the simpler situation of zeroth order stochastic convex optimization this corresponds to the conjecture that the optimal query complexity is of order @math . In?1964 Kolmogorov introduced the concept of the complexity of a?finite object (for instance, the words in a certain alphabet). He defined complexity as the minimum number of binary signs containing all the information about a?given object that are sufficient for its recovery (decoding). This definition depends essentially on the method of decoding. However, by means of the general theory of algorithms, Kolmogorov was able to give an invariant (universal) definition of complexity. Related concepts were investigated by Solomonoff (U.S.A.) and Markov. Using the concept of complexity, Kolmogorov gave definitions of the quantity of information in finite objects and of the concept of a?random sequence (which was then defined more precisely by Martin-L?f). Afterwards, this circle of questions developed rapidly. In particular, an interesting development took place of the ideas of Markov on the application of the concept of complexity to the study of quantitative questions in the theory of algorithms. The present article is a survey of the fundamental results connected with the brief remarks above. We show a worst-case lower bound and a smoothed upper bound on the number of iterations performed by the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm. First proposed by Besl and McKay, the algorithm is widely used in computational geometry, where it is known for its simplicity and its observed speed. The theoretical study of ICP was initiated by Ezra, Sharir, and Efrat, who showed that the worst-case running time to align two sets of @math points in @math is between @math and @math . We substantially tighten this gap by improving the lower bound to @math . To help reconcile this bound with the algorithm's observed speed, we also show that the smoothed complexity of ICP is polynomial, independent of the dimensionality of the data. Using similar methods, we improve the best known smoothed upper bound for the popular k-means method to @math , once again independent of the dimension. This paper concerns the worst-case complexity of Gauss-Seidel method for solving a positive semi-definite linear system; or equivalently, that of cyclic coordinate descent (C-CD) for minimizing a convex quadratic function. The known provable complexity of C-CD can be @math times slower than gradient descent (GD) and @math times slower than randomized coordinate descent (R-CD). However, these gaps seem rather puzzling since so far they have not been observed in practice; in fact, C-CD usually converges much faster than GD and sometimes comparable to R-CD. Thus some researchers believe the gaps are due to the weakness of the proof, but not that of the C-CD algorithm itself. In this paper we show that the gaps indeed exist. We prove that there exists an example for which C-CD takes at least @math or @math operations, where @math is the condition number, @math is a well-studied quantity that determines the convergence rate of R-CD, and @math hides the dependency on @math . This implies that C-CD can indeed be @math times slower than GD, and @math times slower than R-CD in the worst case. Our result establishes one of the few examples in continuous optimization that demonstrates a large gap between a deterministic algorithm and its randomized counterpart. Based on the example, we establish several almost tight complexity bounds of C-CD for quadratic problems. One difficulty with the analysis of the constructed example is that the spectral radius of a non-symmetric iteration matrix does not necessarily constitutes a lower bound for the convergence rate.