This note proposes a new reformulation of complex semidefinite programs (SDPs) as real SDPs. As an application, we present an economical reformulation of complex SDP relaxations of complex polynomial optimization problems as real SDPs and derive some further reductions by exploiting inner structure of the complex SDP relaxations. Various numerical examples demonstrate that our new … Read more
This work establishes provably faster convergence rates for gradient descent in smooth convex optimization via a computer-assisted analysis technique. Our theory allows nonconstant stepsize policies with frequent long steps potentially violating descent by analyzing the overall effect of many iterations at once rather than the typical one-iteration inductions used in most first-order method analyses. We … Read more
It is well-known that by adding integrality constraints to the semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the max-cut problem, the resulting integer semidefinite program is an exact formulation of the problem. In this paper we show similar results for a wide variety of discrete optimization problems for which SDP relaxations have been derived. Based on a … Read more
We study a class of polynomial optimization problems with a robust polynomial matrix inequality constraint for which the uncertainty set is defined also by a polynomial matrix inequality (including robust polynomial semidefinite programs as a special case). Under certain SOS-convexity assumptions, we construct a hierarchy of moment-SOS relaxations for this problem to obtain convergent upper … Read more
Low-rank matrix completion consists of computing a matrix of minimal complexity that recovers a given set of observations as accurately as possible. Unfortunately, existing methods for matrix completion are heuristics that, while highly scalable and often identifying high-quality solutions, do not possess any optimality guarantees. We reexamine matrix completion with an optimality-oriented eye. We reformulate … Read more
Moment-based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides an optimization framework to integrate statistical information with traditional optimization approaches. Under this framework, one assumes that the underlying joint distribution of random parameters runs in a distributional ambiguity set constructed by moment information and makes decisions against the worst-case distribution within the set. Although most moment-based DRO problems … Read more
This paper studies hidden convexity properties associated with constrained optimization problems over the set of rotation matrices \(\text{SO}(n)\). Such problems are nonconvex due to the constraint\(X\in\text{SO}(n)\). Nonetheless, we show that certain linear images of \(\text{SO}(n)\) are convex, opening up the possibility for convex optimization algorithms with provable guarantees for these problems. Our main technical contributions … Read more
Let \(({\bf P},{\bf D})\) be a primal-dual pair of SDPs with a nonzero finite duality gap. Under such circumstances, \({\bf P}\) and \({\bf D}\) are weakly feasible and if we perturb the problem data to recover strong feasibility, the (common) optimal value function \(v\) as a function of the perturbation is not well-defined at zero … Read more
We propose a manifold optimization approach to solve linear semidefinite programs (SDP) with low-rank solutions. This approach incorporates the augmented Lagrangian method and the Burer-Monteiro factorization, and features the adaptive strategies for updating the factorization size and the penalty parameter. We prove that the present algorithm can solve SDPs to global optimality, despite of the … Read more
We study the lift-and-project rank of the stable set polytopes of graphs with respect to the Lovász-Schrijver SDP operator \( \text{LS}_+\), with a particular focus on a search for relatively small graphs with high \( \text{LS}_+\)-rank (the least number of iterations of the \( \text{LS}_+\) operator on the fractional stable set polytope to compute the … Read more