Minimum-Link Covering Trails for any Hypercubic Lattice

\(\) In 1994, Kranakis et al. published a conjecture about the minimum link-length of every rectilinear covering path for the \(k\)-dimensional grid \(P(n,k) := \{0,1, \dots, n-1\} \times \{0,1, \dots, n-1\} \times \cdots \times \{0,1, \dots, n-1\}\). In this paper we consider the general, NP-complete, Line-Cover problem, where the edges are not required to be … Read more

Planning of Container Crossdocking for an Express Shipment Service Network

In air transportation, container crossdocking refers to a loaded container that is transferred at an airport from an incoming flight to an outgoing flight without handling the freight on the container. It reduces handling time and handling cost relative to unloading the container and sorting the freight, and is an economical alternative if a sufficient … Read more

Convergence to a second-order critical point of composite nonsmooth problems by a trust region method

An algorithm for finding a first-order and second-order critical point of composite nonsmooth problems is proposed in this paper. For smooth problems, algorithms for searching such a point usually utilize the so called negative-curvature directions. In this paper, the method recently proposed for nonlinear semidefinite problems by the current author is extended for solving general … Read more

Detecting negative eigenvalues of exact and approximate Hessian matrices in optimization

Nonconvex minimization algorithms often benefit from the use of second-order information as represented by the Hessian matrix. When the Hessian at a critical point possesses negative eigenvalues, the corresponding eigenvectors can be used to search for further improvement in the objective function value. Computing such eigenpairs can be computationally challenging, particularly if the Hessian matrix … Read more

On the convergence of iterative schemes for solving a piecewise linear system of equations

This paper is devoted to studying the global and finite convergence of the semi-smooth Newton method for solving a piecewise linear system that arises in cone-constrained quadratic programming problems and absolute value equations. We first provide a negative answer via a counterexample to a conjecture on the global and finite convergence of the Newton iteration … Read more

Faster Lagrangian-based methods: a unified prediction-correction framework

Motivated by the prediction-correction framework constructed by He and Yuan [SIAM J. Numer. Anal. 50: 700-709, 2012], we propose a unified prediction-correction framework to accelerate Lagrangian-based methods. More precisely, for strongly convex optimization, general linearized Lagrangian method with indefinite proximal term, alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with the step size of Lagrangian multiplier not … Read more

Federated Learning on Riemannian Manifolds

Federated learning (FL) has found many important applications in smart-phone-APP based machine learning applications. Although many algorithms have been studied for FL, to the best of our knowledge, algorithms for FL with nonconvex constraints have not been studied. This paper studies FL over Riemannian manifolds, which finds important applications such as federated PCA and federated … Read more

Decentralized Bilevel Optimization

Bilevel optimization has been successfully applied to many important machine learning problems. Algorithms for solving bilevel optimization have been studied under various settings. In this paper, we study the nonconvex-strongly-convex bilevel optimization under a decentralized setting. We design decentralized algorithms for both deterministic and stochastic bilevel optimization problems. Moreover, we analyze the convergence rates of … Read more

PyEPO: A PyTorch-based End-to-End Predict-then-Optimize Library for Linear and Integer Programming

In deterministic optimization, it is typically assumed that all parameters of the problem are fixed and known. In practice, however, some parameters may be a priori unknown but can be estimated from historical data. A typical predict-then-optimize approach separates predictions and optimization into two stages. Recently, end-to-end predict-then-optimize has become an attractive alternative. In this … Read more