Fast randomized entropically regularized semidefinite programming

Abstract: We develop a practical approach to semidefinite programming (SDP) that includes the von Neumann entropy, or an appropriate variant, as a regularization term. In particular we solve the dual of the regularized program, demonstrating how a carefully chosen randomized trace estimator can be used to estimate dual gradients effectively. We also introduce specialized optimization approaches for common SDP, specifically SDP with diagonal constraint and the problem of the determining the spectral projector onto the span of extremal eigenvectors. We validate our approach on such problems with applications to combinatorial optimization and spectral embedding.