Tighter yet more tractable relaxations and nontrivial instance generation for sparse standard quadratic optimization

The Standard Quadratic optimization Problem (StQP), arguably the simplest among all classes of NP-hard optimization problems, consists of extremizing a quadratic form (the simplest nonlinear polynomial) over the standard simplex (the simplest polytope/compact feasible set). As a problem class, StQPs may be nonconvex with an exponential number of inefficient local solutions. StQPs arise in a … Read more

Exploiting Sign Symmetries in Minimizing Sums of Rational Functions

This paper is devoted to the problem of minimizing a sum of rational functions over a basic semialgebraic set. We provide a hierarchy of sum of squares (SOS) relaxations that is dual to the generalized moment problem approach due to Bugarin, Henrion, and Lasserre. The investigation of the dual SOS aspect offers two benefits: 1) … Read more

Edge expansion of a graph: SDP-based computational strategies

Computing the edge expansion of a graph is a famously hard combinatorial problem for which there have been many approximation studies. We present two variants of exact algorithms using semidefinite programming (SDP) to compute this constant for any graph. The first variant uses the SDP relaxation first to reduce the search space considerably. The problem … Read more

A Bilevel Hierarchy of Strengthened Complex Moment Relaxations for Complex Polynomial Optimization

This paper proposes a bilevel hierarchy of strengthened complex moment relaxations for complex polynomial optimization. The key trick entails considering a class of positive semidefinite conditions that arise naturally in characterizing the normality of the so-called shift operators. The relaxation problem in this new hierarchy is parameterized by the usual relaxation order as well as … Read more

On Averaging and Extrapolation for Gradient Descent

This work considers the effect of averaging, and more generally extrapolation, of the iterates of gradient descent in smooth convex optimization. After running the method, rather than reporting the final iterate, one can report either a convex combination of the iterates (averaging) or a generic combination of the iterates (extrapolation). For several common stepsize sequences, … Read more

T-semidefinite programming relaxation with third-order tensors for constrained polynomial optimization

We study T-semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for constrained polynomial optimization problems (POPs). T-SDP relaxation for unconstrained POPs was introduced by Zheng, Huang and Hu in 2022. In this work, we propose a T-SDP relaxation for POPs with polynomial inequality constraints and show that the resulting T-SDP relaxation formulated with third-order tensors can be transformed into … Read more

Cuts and semidefinite liftings for the complex cut polytope

We consider the complex cut polytope: the convex hull of Hermitian rank 1 matrices \(xx^{\mathrm{H}}\), where the elements of \(x \in \mathbb{C}^n\) are \(m\)th unit roots. These polytopes have applications in \({\text{MAX-3-CUT}}\), digital communication technology, angular synchronization and more generally, complex quadratic programming. For \({m=2}\), the complex cut polytope corresponds to the well-known cut polytope. … Read more

Refined TSSOS

The moment-sum of squares hierarchy by Lasserre has become an established technique for solving polynomial optimization problems. It provides a monotonically increasing series of tight bounds, but has well-known scalability limitations. For structured optimization problems, the term-sparsity SOS (TSSOS) approach scales much better due to block-diagonal matrices, obtained by completing the connected components of adjacency … Read more