A weighted and convex regularized nuclear norm model is introduced to construct a rank constrained linear transform on feature vectors of deep neural networks. The feature vectors of each class are modeled by a subspace, and the linear transform aims to enlarge the pairwise angles of the subspaces. The weight and convex regularization resolve the rank degeneracy of the linear transform. The model is computed by a dierence of convex function algorithm whose descent and convergence properties are analyzed. Numerical experiments are carried out in convolutional neural networks on CAFFE platform for 10 class handwritten digit images (MNIST) and small object color images (CIFAR-10) in the public domain. The transformed feature vectors improve the accuracy of the network in the regime of low dimensional features subsequent to principal component analysis. The feature transform is independent of the network structure, and can be applied without retraining the feature extraction layers of the network.

The transformed $l_1$ penalty (TL1) functions are a one parameter family of bilinear transformations composed with the absolute value function. When acting on vectors, the TL1 penalty interpolates $l_0$ and $l_1$ similar to $l_p$ norm, where $p$ is in $(0,1)$. In our companion paper, we showed that TL1 is a robust sparsity promoting penalty in compressed sensing (CS) problems for a broad range of incoherent and coherent sensing matrices. Here we develop an explicit fixed point representation for the TL1 regularized minimization problem. The TL1 thresholding functions are in closed form for all parameter values. In contrast, the $l_p$ thresholding functions ($p$ is in $[0,1]$) are in closed form only for $p=0;1;1=2;2=3$, known as hard, soft, half, and 2/3 thresholding respectively. The TL1 threshold values differ in subcritical (supercritical) parameter regime where the TL1 threshold functions are continuous (discontinuous) similar to soft-thresholding (half-thresholding) functions. We propose TL1 iterative thresholding algorithms and compare them with hard and half thresholding algorithms in CS test problems. For both incoherent and coherent sensing matrices, a proposed TL1 iterative thresholding algorithm with adaptive subcritical and supercritical thresholds (TL1IT-s1 for short), consistently performs the best in sparse signal recovery with and without measurement noise.

We study the super-resolution (SR) problem of recovering point sources consisting of a collection of isolated and suitably separated spikes from only the low frequency measurements. If the peak separation is above a factor in $(1, 2)$ of the Rayleigh length (physical resolution limit), L1 minimization is guaranteed to recover such sparse signals. However, below such critical length scale, especially the Rayleigh length, the $L_1$ certificate no longer exists. We show several local properties (local minimum, directional stationarity, and sparsity) of the limit points of minimizing two $L_1$ based nonconvex penalties, the difference of $L_1$ and $L_2$ norms $(L_{1-2})$ and capped $L_1 (CL_1)$, subject to the measurement constraints. In one and two dimensional numerical SR examples,the local optimal solutions from dierence of convex function algorithms outperform the global L1 solutions near or below Rayleigh length scales either in the accuracy of ground truth recovery or in nding a sparse solution satisfying the constraints more accurately.