Andersen Ang

Yixuan Li, Andersen Ang, Sebastian Stein

Efficient large-scale network allocation requires pricing mechanisms that internalize the stochastic and non-linear dynamics of user behavior. Moving beyond classical models of strategic agents, we introduce an Optimal Network Pricing (ONP) problem for ``oblivious'' users. This shift introduces a Decision-Dependent (DD) environment where pricing decisions endogenously shift the flow demand distribution. A key novelty of our model is the incorporation of a projection operator, creating a nonsmooth optimization landscape. We demonstrate that Performative Stability (PS) fails in ONP, degenerating to a trivial solution. Instead, we prove that the expected objective admits a unique global optimum, termed the Projected Performative Optimum (ΠPO). To overcome the algorithmic challenges, we propose a rigorous framework combining Sample Average Approximation (SAA) with a Trust-Region Sequential Quadratic Programming (TR-SQP) solver. Our method targets ΠPO by explicitly modeling the nonsmooth Jacobian, effectively handling saturation constraints. We establish theoretical guarantees for probabilistic convexity and sample complexity, and exploit network sparsity to reduce per-iteration computational complexity to near-linear in the number of routes. Experimental validation on the classic Braess network and large-scale real-world topologies demonstrates that our ΠPO-targeting solver significantly outperforms PS-seeking heuristics and our proposed baseline. The results highlight that properly accounting for the ``gating'' effects of capacity unlocks substantial gains in social welfare, providing a robust foundation for network pricing.

Xiaoqing Huang, Andersen Ang, Kun Huang et al.

We study estimation of piecewise smooth signals over a graph. We propose a $\ell_{2,0}$-norm penalized Graph Trend Filtering (GTF) model to estimate piecewise smooth graph signals that exhibit inhomogeneous levels of smoothness across the nodes. We prove that the proposed GTF model is simultaneously a k-means clustering on the signal over the nodes and a minimum graph cut on the edges of the graph, where the clustering and the cut share the same assignment matrix. We propose two methods to solve the proposed GTF model: a spectral decomposition method and a method based on simulated annealing. In the experiment on synthetic and real-world datasets, we show that the proposed GTF model has a better performances compared with existing approaches on the tasks of denoising, support recovery and semi-supervised classification. We also show that the proposed GTF model can be solved more efficiently than existing models for the dataset with a large edge set.

Flavia Esposito, Andersen Ang

Low-rank optimization problems with sparse simplex constraints involve variables that must satisfy nonnegativity, sparsity, and sum-to-one conditions, making their optimization particularly challenging due to the interplay between low-rank structures and constraints. These problems arise in various applications, including machine learning, signal processing, environmental fields, and computational biology. In this paper, we propose a novel manifold optimization approach to tackle these problems efficiently. Our method leverages the geometry of oblique rotation manifolds to reformulate the problem and introduces a new Riemannian optimization method based on Riemannian gradient descent that strictly maintains the simplex constraints. By exploiting the underlying manifold structure, our approach improves optimization efficiency. Experiments on synthetic datasets compared to standard Euclidean and Riemannian methods show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Laura Selicato, Flavia Esposito, Andersen Ang et al.

The selection of penalty hyperparameters is a critical aspect in Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF), since these values control the trade-off between the reconstruction accuracy and the adherence to desired constraints. In this work, we focus on an NMF problem involving the Itakura-Saito (IS) divergence, effective for extracting low spectral density components from spectrograms of mixed signals, enhanced with sparsity constraints. We propose a new algorithm called SHINBO, which introduces a bi-level optimization framework to automatically and adaptively tune the row-dependent penalty hyperparameters, enhancing the ability of IS-NMF to isolate sparse, periodic signals against noise. Experimental results showed SHINBO ensures precise spectral decomposition and demonstrates superior performance in both synthetic and real-world applications. For the latter, SHINBO is particularly useful, as noninvasive vibration-based fault detection in rolling bearings, where the desired signal components often reside in high-frequency subbands but are obscured by stronger, spectrally broader noise. By addressing the critical issue of hyperparameter selection, SHINBO advances the state-of-the-art in signal recovery for complex, noise-dominated environments.

Andersen Ang, Waqas Bin Hamed, Hans De Sterck

When applying nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), the rank parameter is generally unknown. This rank, called the nonnegative rank, is usually estimated heuristically since computing its exact value is NP-hard. In this work, we propose an approximation method to estimate the rank on-the-fly while solving NMF. We use the sum-of-norm (SON), a group-lasso structure that encourages pairwise similarity, to reduce the rank of a factor matrix when the initial rank is overestimated. On various datasets, SON-NMF can reveal the correct nonnegative rank of the data without prior knowledge or parameter tuning. SON-NMF is a nonconvex, nonsmooth, non-separable, and non-proximable problem, making it nontrivial to solve. First, since rank estimation in NMF is NP-hard, the proposed approach does not benefit from lower computational complexity. Using a graph-theoretic argument, we prove that the complexity of SON-NMF is essentially irreducible. Second, the per-iteration cost of algorithms for SON-NMF can be high. This motivates us to propose a first-order BCD algorithm that approximately solves SON-NMF with low per-iteration cost via the proximal average operator. SON-NMF exhibits favorable features for applications. Besides the ability to automatically estimate the rank from data, SON-NMF can handle rank-deficient data matrices and detect weak components with small energy. Furthermore, in hyperspectral imaging, SON-NMF naturally addresses the issue of spectral variability.

Andersen Ang, Jianzhu Ma, Nianjun Liu et al.

We consider the problem of projecting a vector onto the so-called k-capped simplex, which is a hyper-cube cut by a hyperplane. For an n-dimensional input vector with bounded elements, we found that a simple algorithm based on Newton's method is able to solve the projection problem to high precision with a complexity roughly about O(n), which has a much lower computational cost compared with the existing sorting-based methods proposed in the literature. We provide a theory for partial explanation and justification of the method. We demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can produce a solution of the projection problem with high precision on large scale datasets, and the algorithm is able to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art methods in terms of runtime (about 6-8 times faster than a commercial software with respect to CPU time for input vector with 1 million variables or more). We further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm on solving sparse regression in a bioinformatics problem. Empirical results on the GWAS dataset (with 1,500,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms) show that, when using the proposed method to accelerate the Projected Quasi-Newton (PQN) method, the accelerated PQN algorithm is able to handle huge-scale regression problem and it is more efficient (about 3-6 times faster) than the current state-of-the-art methods.