In this paper we extend the algorithm and several results published in the celebrated 1959 paper of Cheney and Goldstein about the best approximation pair (BAP) problem in two separate directions. One is the consideration of more than two sets. The other is the ability to handle each set as an intersections of a finite … Read more
We consider the probabilistic traveling salesman problem (PTSP) in which customer presences are Bernoulli random variables, and the objective is to determine an a priori tour minimizing the expected traveling cost of the a posteriori tour obtained by skipping absent customers after customer presence is revealed. The existing literature has established that, given an a … Read more
The symmetry measure of a convex body \(S\subset\mathbb{R}^n\) is given by: \[ \mathrm{sym}(S):=\max\{\alpha\ge0:\text{ there exists }x\in S\text{ such that } -\alpha(S-x)\subseteq S-x\}\,, \]where such an \(x\) is called a Minkowski center. We prove that every convex body \(S\) admits a \(\sqrt{\frac{n}{\mathrm{sym}(S)}}\)-rounding of \(S\), namely, there exists an origin-centered ellipsoid \(E\) and a center \(c\) such … Read more
In this paper, we propose a unified framework for accelerated gradient methods, dubbed UGM, which subsumes a wide range of accelerated and conventional gradient-type methods designed for minimizing $L$-smooth and $\mu$-strongly convex functions. We demonstrate that the iteration update of the proposed framework can be intrinsically interpreted as a hybrid combination of the heavy-ball method … Read more
Inspired by the progressive decoupling of linkages methodology for optimization and variational inequalities, we propose an algorithm for solving quasi-variational inequalities as a sequence of variational inequalities. Our method is shown to converge locally under some regularity conditions and globally when such conditions hold throughout the entire domain. Separately, under other type of assumptions, global … Read more
Singularity degree is an important measure of semidefinite programming (SDP) degeneracy, but it is generally unavailable a priori from the problem data. We augment the Shor relaxation of binary sets \(\{x\in\{0,1\}^n:Ax=b\}\) with the first-level Reformulation–Linearization Technique (RLT) equations generated by the defining linear equalities. For the resulting equality-generated SDP–RLT relaxation, we determine the exact worst-case … Read more
We study decentralized minimization of an average of strongly convex, smooth local objectives over an intersection of agent-private closed convex sets, where each agent knows only its own objective and its own set and agents communicate over a gossip network. We show that the complexity is controlled by a single geometric scalar, which we call … Read more
This work considers the design of first-order convex optimization algorithms and convergence proofs. In particular, we consider nonsmooth Lipschitz and smooth problems accessed through a subgradient or gradient oracle, respectively. For the general class of fixed-step first-order methods, prior work on Performance Estimation Problems (PEPs) has shown that structured, tight convergence proofs typically exist. Under … Read more
We revisit the Sinkhorn-Knopp (SK) algorithm for the matrix scaling problem. Despite extensive literature on the global convergence of SK and its variants, its local linear convergence behavior remains less understood. We address this gap by providing the first nonasymptotic local analysis of SK that matches the rate obtained from existing asymptotic Jacobian-based arguments. We … Read more
We present AutoOPT, a domain-specific harness for end-to-end automation of optimization research. AutoOPT organizes the discovery of optimal first-order methods into four stages: numerical design through the BnB-PEP methodology; symbolic discovery of the analytic description and a convergence proof through frontier large language models (LLMs); formal verification in the Lean 4 proof assistant; and human … Read more