Time-Domain Decomposition for Mixed-Integer Optimal Control Problems

We consider mixed-integer optimal control problems, whose optimality conditions involve global combinatorial optimization aspects for the corresponding Hamiltonian pointwise in time. We propose a time-domain decomposition, which makes this problem class accessible for mixed-integer programming using parallel-in-time direct discretizations. The approach is based on a decomposition of the optimality system and the interpretation of the … Read more

Worst-case evaluation complexity of derivative-free nonmonotone line search methods for solving nonlinear systems of equations

In this paper we study a class of derivative-free nonmonotone line search methods for solving nonlinear systems of equations, which includes the method N-DF-SANE proposed in (IMA J. Numer. Anal. 29: 814–825, 2009). These methods correspond to derivative-free optimization methods applied to the minimization of a suitable merit function. Assuming that the mapping defining the … Read more

On Piecewise Linear Approximations of Bilinear Terms: Structural Comparison of Univariate and Bivariate Mixed-Integer Programming Formulations

Bilinear terms naturally appear in many optimization problems. Their inherent nonconvexity typically makes them challenging to solve. One approach to tackle this difficulty is to use bivariate piecewise linear approximations for each variable product, which can be represented via mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) formulations. Alternatively, one can reformulate the variable products as a sum of … Read more

QCQP with Extra Constant Modulus Constraints: Theory and Applications on QoS Constrained Hybrid Beamforming for mmWave MU-MIMO

The constant modulus constraint is widely used in analog beamforming, hybrid beamforming, intelligent reflecting surface design, and radar waveform design. The quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem is also widely used in signal processing. However, the QCQP with extra constant modulus constraints was not systematically studied in mathematic programming and signal processing. For example, the … Read more

An abstract convergence framework with application to inertial inexact forward-backward methods

In this paper we introduce a novel abstract descent scheme suited for the minimization of proper and lower semicontinuous functions. The proposed abstract scheme generalizes a set of properties that are crucial for the convergence of several first-order methods designed for nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems. Such properties guarantee the convergence of the full sequence of … Read more

A Reformulation Technique to Solve Polynomial Optimization Problems with Separable Objective Functions of Bounded Integer Variables

Real-world problems are often nonconvex and involve integer variables, representing vexing challenges to be tackled using state-of-the-art solvers. We introduce a mathematical identity-based reformulation of a class of polynomial integer nonlinear optimization (PINLO) problems using a technique that linearizes polynomial functions of separable and bounded integer variables of any degree. We also introduce an alternative … Read more

Minimization over the l1-ball using an active-set non-monotone projected gradient

The l1-ball is a nicely structured feasible set that is widely used in many fields (e.g., machine learning, statistics and signal analysis) to enforce some sparsity in the model solutions. In this paper, we devise an active-set strategy for efficiently dealing with minimization problems over the l1-ball and embed it into a tailored algorithmic scheme … Read more

A New Multipoint Symmetric Secant Method with a Dense Initial Matrix

In large-scale optimization, when either forming or storing Hessian matrices are prohibitively expensive, quasi-Newton methods are often used in lieu of Newton’s method because they only require first-order information to approximate the true Hessian.  Multipoint symmetric secant (MSS) methods can be thought of as generalizations of quasi-Newton methods in that they attempt to impose additional requirements on their approximation of the … Read more

Full-low evaluation methods for derivative-free optimization

We propose a new class of rigorous methods for derivative-free optimization with the aim of delivering efficient and robust numerical performance for functions of all types, from smooth to non-smooth, and under different noise regimes. To this end, we have developed Full-Low Evaluation methods, organized around two main types of iterations. The first iteration type … Read more

A spectral PALM algorithm for matrix and tensor-train based Dictionary Learning

Dictionary Learning (DL) is one of the leading sparsity promoting techniques in the context of image classification, where the “dictionary” matrix D of images and the sparse matrix X are determined so as to represent a redundant image dataset. The resulting constrained optimization problem is nonconvex and non-smooth, providing several computational challenges for its solution. … Read more