Maximal entropy in the moment body

A moment body is a linear projection of the spectraplex, the convex set of trace-one positive semidefinite matrices. Determining whether a given point lies within a given moment body is a problem with numerous applications in quantum state estimation or polynomial optimization. This moment body membership oracle can be addressed with semidefinite programming, for which … Read more

Efficient QUIC-Based Damped Inexact Iterative Reweighting for Sparse Inverse Covariance Estimation with Nonconvex Partly Smooth Regularization

In this paper, we study sparse inverse covariance matrix estimation incorporating partly smooth nonconvex regularizers. To solve the resulting regularized log-determinant problem, we develop DIIR-QUIC—a novel Damped Inexact Iteratively Reweighted algorithm based on QUadratic approximate Inverse Covariance (QUIC) method. Our approach generalizes the classic iteratively reweighted \(\ell_1\) scheme through damped fixed-point updates. A key novelty … Read more

Dual certificates of primal cone membership

We discuss easily verifiable cone membership certificates, that is, certificates proving relations of the form \( b\in K \) for convex cones \(K\) that consist of vectors in the dual cone \(K^*\). Vectors in the dual cone are usually associated with separating hyperplanes, and so they are interpreted as certificates of non-membership in the standard … Read more

Relaxations of KKT Conditions do not Strengthen Finite RLT and SDP-RLT Bounds for Nonconvex Quadratic Programs

We consider linear and semidefinite programming relaxations of nonconvex quadratic programs given by the reformulation-linearization technique (RLT relaxation), and the Shor relaxation combined with the RLT relaxation (SDP-RLT relaxation). By incorporating the first-order optimality conditions, a quadratic program can be formulated as an optimization problem with complementarity constraints. We investigate the effect of incorporating optimality … Read more

SDP bounds on the stability number via ADMM and intermediate levels of the Lasserre hierarchy

We consider the Lasserre hierarchy for computing bounds on the stability number of graphs. The semidefinite programs (SDPs) arising from this hierarchy involve large matrix variables and many linear constraints, which makes them difficult to solve using interior-point methods. We propose solving these SDPs using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). When the second … Read more

A Computational Search for Minimal Obstruction Graphs for the Lovász–Schrijver SDP Hierarchy

We study the lift-and-project relaxations of the stable set polytope of graphs generated by \( \text{LS}_+ \), the SDP lift-and-project operator devised by Lovász and Schrijver. In particular, we focus on searching for \( \ell \)-minimal graphs, which are graphs on $3\ell$ vertices whose stable set polytope has rank \( \ell \) with respect to … Read more

Solving a linear program via a single unconstrained minimization

This paper proposes a novel approach for solving linear programs. We reformulate a primal-dual linear program as an unconstrained minimization of a convex and twice continuously differentiable merit function. When the optimal set of the primal-dual pair is nonempty, its optimal set is equal to the optimal set of the proposed merit function. Minimizing this … Read more

cuHALLaR: A GPU accelerated low-rank augmented Lagrangian method for large-scale semidefinite programming

This paper introduces cuHALLaR, a GPU-accelerated implementation of the HALLaR method proposed in Monteiro et al. 2024 for solving large-scale semidefinite programming (SDP) problems. We demonstrate how our Julia-based implementation efficiently uses GPU parallelism through optimization of simple, but key, operations, including linear maps, adjoints, and gradient evaluations. Extensive numerical experiments across three problem classes—maximum … Read more

PDCS: A Primal-Dual Large-Scale Conic Programming Solver with GPU Enhancements

In this paper, we introduce the Primal-Dual Conic Programming Solver (PDCS), a large-scale conic programming solver with GPU enhancements. Problems that PDCS currently supports include linear programs, second-order cone programs, convex quadratic programs, and exponential cone programs. PDCS achieves scalability to large-scale problems by leveraging sparse matrix-vector multiplication as its core computational operation, which is … Read more

Rank-one convexification for convex quadratic optimization with step function penalties

We investigate convexification in convex quadratic optimization with step function penalties. Such problems can be cast as mixed-integer quadratic optimization problems, where binary variables are used to encode the non-convex step function. First, we derive the convex hull for the epigraph of a quadratic function defined by a rank-one matrix. Using this rank-one convexification, we … Read more