We consider the problem of rigid registration, where we wish to jointly register multiple point sets via rigid transforms. This arises in applications such as sensor network localization, multiview registration, and protein structure determination. The least-squares estimator for this problem can be reduced to a rank-constrained semidefinite program (REG-SDP). It was recently shown that by formally applying the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), we can derive an iterative solver (REG-ADMM) for REG-SDP, wherein each subproblem admits a simple closed-form solution. The empirical success of REG-ADMM has been demonstrated for multiview registration. However, its convergence does not follow from the existing literature on nonconvex ADMM. In this work, we study the convergence of REG-ADMM and our main findings are as follows. We prove that any fixed point of REG-ADMM is a stationary (KKT) point of REG-SDP. Moreover, for clean measurements, we give an explicit formula for the ADMM parameter @math , for which REG-ADMM is guaranteed to converge to the global optimum (with arbitrary initialization). If the noise is low, we can still show that the iterates converge to the global optimum, provided they are initialized sufficiently close to the optimum. On the other hand, if the noise is high, we explain why REG-ADMM becomes unstable if @math is less than some threshold, irrespective of the initialization. We present simulation results to support our theoretical predictions. The novelty of our analysis lies in the fact that we exploit the notion of tightness of convex relaxation to arrive at our convergence results.
The theoretical convergence of ADMM for nonconvex problems has been studied in @cite_17 @cite_0 @cite_7 . However, a crucial working assumption common to these results does not hold in our case. More precisely, observe that we can rewrite as where @math is the indicator function associated with a feasible set @math @cite_27 , namely, @math if @math , and @math otherwise. Notice that, because of the indicator functions, the objective function in is non-differentiable in @math and @math . This violates a regularity assumption common in existing analyses of nonconvex ADMM, namely, that the objective must be smooth in one variable. In these works, convergence results are obtained by proving a monotonic decrease in the augmented Lagrangian. This requires: (i) bounding successive difference in dual variables by successive difference in primal variable, which is where the assumption of smoothness is used; (ii) requiring that the parameter @math is above a certain threshold. In particular, it is not clear whether this thresholding of the value of @math is fundamental to convergence, or just an artifact of the analysis.
@cite_0 @cite_27 @cite_7 @cite_17
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Aiming at solving large-scale optimization problems, this paper studies distributed optimization methods based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). By formulating the optimization problem as a consensus problem, the ADMM can be used to solve the consensus problem in a fully parallel fashion over a computer network with a star topology. However, traditional synchronized computation does not scale well with the problem size, as the speed of the algorithm is limited by the slowest workers. This is particularly true in a heterogeneous network where the computing nodes experience different computation and communication delays. In this paper, we propose an asynchronous distributed ADMM (AD-ADMM), which can effectively improve the time efficiency of distributed optimization. Our main interest lies in analyzing the convergence conditions of the AD-ADMM, under the popular partially asynchronous model, which is defined based on a maximum tolerable delay of the network. Specifically, by considering general and possibly non-convex cost functions, we show that the AD-ADMM is guaranteed to converge to the set of Karush–Kuhn–Tucker (KKT) points as long as the algorithm parameters are chosen appropriately according to the network delay. We further illustrate that the asynchrony of the ADMM has to be handled with care, as slightly modifying the implementation of the AD-ADMM can jeopardize the algorithm convergence, even under the standard convex setting. Many problems of recent interest in statistics and machine learning can be posed in the framework of convex optimization. Due to the explosion in size and complexity of modern datasets, it is increasingly important to be able to solve problems with a very large number of features or training examples. As a result, both the decentralized collection or storage of these datasets as well as accompanying distributed solution methods are either necessary or at least highly desirable. In this review, we argue that the alternating direction method of multipliers is well suited to distributed convex optimization, and in particular to large-scale problems arising in statistics, machine learning, and related areas. The method was developed in the 1970s, with roots in the 1950s, and is equivalent or closely related to many other algorithms, such as dual decomposition, the method of multipliers, Douglas–Rachford splitting, Spingarn's method of partial inverses, Dykstra's alternating projections, Bregman iterative algorithms for l1 problems, proximal methods, and others. After briefly surveying the theory and history of the algorithm, we discuss applications to a wide variety of statistical and machine learning problems of recent interest, including the lasso, sparse logistic regression, basis pursuit, covariance selection, support vector machines, and many others. We also discuss general distributed optimization, extensions to the nonconvex setting, and efficient implementation, including some details on distributed MPI and Hadoop MapReduce implementations. In this paper, we analyze the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for minimizing a nonconvex and possibly nonsmooth objective function, ( (x_0, ,x_p,y) ), subject to coupled linear equality constraints. Our ADMM updates each of the primal variables (x_0, ,x_p,y ), followed by updating the dual variable. We separate the variable y from (x_i )’s as it has a special role in our analysis. The developed convergence guarantee covers a variety of nonconvex functions such as piecewise linear functions, ( _q ) quasi-norm, Schatten-q quasi-norm ( (0<q<1 )), minimax concave penalty (MCP), and smoothly clipped absolute deviation penalty. It also allows nonconvex constraints such as compact manifolds (e.g., spherical, Stiefel, and Grassman manifolds) and linear complementarity constraints. Also, the (x_0 )-block can be almost any lower semi-continuous function. By applying our analysis, we show, for the first time, that several ADMM algorithms applied to solve nonconvex models in statistical learning, optimization on manifold, and matrix decomposition are guaranteed to converge. Our results provide sufficient conditions for ADMM to converge on (convex or nonconvex) monotropic programs with three or more blocks, as they are special cases of our model. ADMM has been regarded as a variant to the augmented Lagrangian method (ALM). We present a simple example to illustrate how ADMM converges but ALM diverges with bounded penalty parameter ( ). Indicated by this example and other analysis in this paper, ADMM might be a better choice than ALM for some nonconvex nonsmooth problems, because ADMM is not only easier to implement, it is also more likely to converge for the concerned scenarios. The alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is widely used to solve large-scale linearly constrained optimization problems, convex or nonconvex, in many engineering fields. However there is a general lack of theoretical understanding of the algorithm when the objective function is nonconvex. In this paper we analyze the convergence of the ADMM for solving certain nonconvex consensus and sharing problems. We show that the classical ADMM converges to the set of stationary solutions, provided that the penalty parameter in the augmented Lagrangian is chosen to be sufficiently large. For the sharing problems, we show that the ADMM is convergent regardless of the number of variable blocks. Our analysis does not impose any assumptions on the iterates generated by the algorithm and is broadly applicable to many ADMM variants involving proximal update rules and various flexible block selection rules.