A Trust-Region Algorithm for Noisy Equality Constrained Optimization

This paper introduces a modified Byrd-Omojokun (BO) trust region algorithm to address the challenges posed by noisy function and gradient evaluations. The original BO method was designed to solve equality constrained problems and it forms the backbone of some interior point methods for general large-scale constrained optimization. A key strength of the BO method is … Read more

A Line Search Filter Sequential Adaptive Cubic Regularisation Algorithm for Nonlinearly Constrained Optimization

In this paper, a sequential adaptive regularization algorithm using cubics (ARC) is presented to solve nonlinear equality constrained optimization. It is motivated by the idea of handling constraints in sequential quadratic programming methods. In each iteration, we decompose the new step into the sum of the normal step and the tangential step by using composite … Read more

The Augmented Factorization Bound for Maximum-Entropy Sampling

The maximum-entropy sampling problem (MESP) aims to select the most informative principal submatrix of a prespecified size from a given covariance matrix. This paper proposes an augmented factorization bound for MESP based on concave relaxation. By leveraging majorization and Schur-concavity theory, we demonstrate that this new bound dominates the classic factorization bound of Nikolov (2015) and a recent … Read more

Variance-reduced first-order methods for deterministically constrained stochastic nonconvex optimization with strong convergence guarantees

\(\) In this paper, we study a class of deterministically constrained stochastic optimization problems. Existing methods typically aim to find an \(\epsilon\)-stochastic stationary point, where the expected violations of both constraints and first-order stationarity are within a prescribed accuracy \(\epsilon\). However, in many practical applications, it is crucial that the constraints be nearly satisfied with … Read more

Global convergence of a second-order augmented Lagrangian method under an error bound condition

This work deals with convergence to points satisfying the weak second-order necessary optimality conditions of a second-order safeguarded augmented Lagrangian method from the literature. To this end, we propose a new second-order sequential optimality condition that is, in a certain way, based on the iterates generated by the algorithm itself. This also allows us to … Read more

Second-Order Contingent Derivatives: Computation and Application

It is known that second-order (Studniarski) contingent derivatives can be used to compute tangents to the solution set of a generalized equation when standard (first-order) regularity conditions are absent, but relaxed (second-order) regularity conditions are fulfilled. This fact, roughly speaking, is only relevant in practice as long as the computation of second-order contingent derivatives itself … Read more

A Unified Funnel Restoration SQP Algorithm

We consider nonlinearly constrained optimization problems and discuss a generic double-loop framework consisting of four algorithmic ingredients that unifies a broad range of nonlinear optimization solvers. This framework has been implemented in the open-source solver Uno, a Swiss-army knife-like C++ optimization framework that unifies many nonlinearly constrained nonconvex optimization solvers. We illustrate the framework with … Read more

A Two Stepsize SQP Method for Nonlinear Equality Constrained Stochastic Optimization

We develop a Sequential Quadratic Optimization (SQP) algorithm for minimizing a stochastic objective function subject to deterministic equality constraints. The method utilizes two different stepsizes, one which exclusively scales the component of the step corrupted by the variance of the stochastic gradient estimates and a second which scales the entire step. We prove that this … Read more

Single-Loop Deterministic and Stochastic Interior-Point Algorithms for Nonlinearly Constrained Optimization

An interior-point algorithm framework is proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving nonlinearly constrained continuous optimization problems. The main setting of interest is when the objective and constraint functions may be nonlinear and/or nonconvex, and when constraint values and derivatives are tractable to compute, but objective function values and derivatives can only be estimated. The algorithm … Read more

Immunity to Increasing Condition Numbers of Linear Superiorization versus Linear Programming

Given a family of linear constraints and a linear objective function one can consider whether to apply a Linear Programming (LP) algorithm or use a Linear Superiorization (LinSup) algorithm on this data. In the LP methodology one aims at finding a point that fulfills the constraints and has the minimal value of the objective function … Read more