A block decomposition method is proposed for minimizing a (possibly non-convex) continuously differentiable function subject to one linear equality constraint and simple bounds on the variables. The proposed method iteratively selects a pair of coordinates according to an almost cyclic strategy that does not use first-order information, allowing us not to compute the whole gradient … Read more
Level-set optimization formulations with data-driven constraints minimize a regularization functional subject to matching observations to a given error level. These formulations are widely used, particularly for matrix completion and sparsity promotion in data interpolation and denoising. The misfit level is typically measured in the l2 norm, or other smooth metrics. In this paper, we present … Read more
Pricing of access to energy networks is an important issue in liberalized energy sectors because of the natural monopoly character of the underlying transport infrastructures. We introduce a general pricing framework for potential-based energy flows in arbitrarily structured transport networks. In different specifications of our general pricing model we discuss first- and second-best pricing results … Read more
This paper describes and establishes the iteration-complexity of a doubly accelerated inexact proximal point (D-AIPP) method for solving the nonconvex composite minimization problem whose objective function is of the form f+h where f is a (possibly nonconvex) differentiable function whose gradient is Lipschitz continuous and h is a closed convex function with bounded domain. D-AIPP … Read more
Semidefinite programming relaxations complement polyhedral relaxations for quadratic optimization, but global optimization solvers built on polyhedral relaxations cannot fully exploit this advantage. This paper develops linear outer-approximations of semidefinite constraints that can be effectively integrated into global solvers. The difference from previous work is that our proposed cuts are (i) sparser with respect to the … Read more
We introduce a sequential optimality condition for locally Lipschitz constrained nonsmooth optimization, verifiable just using derivative information, and which holds even in the absence of any constraint qualification. The proposed sequential optimality condition is not only novel for nonsmooth problems, but brings new insights for the smooth case as well. We present a practical algorithm … Read more
In this paper, we study the loss surface of the over-parameterized fully connected deep neural networks. We prove that for any continuous activation functions, the loss function has no bad strict local minimum, both in the regular sense and in the sense of sets. This result holds for any convex and differentiable loss function, and … Read more
In this paper, we consider the nonconvex quadratic optimization problem with a single quadratic constraint. First we give a theoretical characterization of the local non-global minimizers. Then we extend the recent characterization of the global minimizer via a generalized eigenvalue problem to the local non-global minimizers. Finally, we use these results to derive an efficient … Read more
We consider feasibility problems defined by a set of constraints that exhibit gradient H\”older continuity plus additional constraints defined by the affordability of obtaining approximate minimizers of quadratic models onto the associated feasible set. Each iteration of the method introduced in this paper involves the approximate minimization of a two-norm regularized quadratic subject to the … Read more
The generalized problem of moments is a conic linear optimization problem over the convex cone of positive Borel measures with given support. It has a large variety of applications, including global optimization of polynomials and rational functions, options pricing in finance, constructing quadrature schemes for numerical integration, and distributionally robust optimization. A usual solution approach, … Read more