The ADMM algorithm for audio signal recovery and performance modification with the dual Douglas-Rachford dynamical system

Practitioners employ operator splitting methods—such as alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and its “dual” Douglas-Rachford method (DR)—to solve many kinds of optimization problems. We provide a gentle introduction to these algorithms, and illustrations of their duality-like relationship in the context of solving basis pursuit problems for audio signal recovery. Recently, researchers have used the dynamical systems associated with the iterates of splitting methods to motivate the development of schemes to improve performance. These developments include a class of methods that act by iteratively minimizing surrogates for a Lyapunov function for the dynamical system. An exemplar of this class is currently state-of-the-art for the feasibility problem of finding wavelets with special structure. Early experimental evidence has also suggested that, when implemented in a primal-dual (ADMM and DR) framework, this exemplar may provide improved performance for basis pursuit problems. We provide a reasonable way to compute the updates for this exemplar, and we study the application of this method to the aforementioned basis pursuit audio problems. We provide experimental results and visualizations of the dynamical system for the dual DR sequence. We observe that for highly structured problems with real data, the algorithmic behavior is noticeably different than for randomly generated problems.