Scheduling Bodyguards

Security agencies throughout the world use bodyguards to protect government officials and public figures. In this paper, we consider a two-person zero-sum game between a defender who allocates such bodyguards to protect several targets and an attacker who chooses one target to attack. Because the number of feasible bodyguard allocations grows quickly as either the … Read more

Considering homeowner acceptance of retrofit measures within energy supply network optimization

A key factor towards a low-carbon society is energy efficient heating of private houses. The choice of heating technology as well as the decision for certain energy-efficient house renovations are made mainly by individual homeowners. In contrast, municipal energy network planning heavily depends on and strongly affects these decisions. Further, there are different conflicting objectives … Read more

A Subspace Minimization Barzilai-Borwein Method for Multiobjective Optimization Problems

Nonlinear conjugate gradient methods have recently garnered significant attention within the multiobjective optimization community. These methods aim to maintain consistency in conjugate parameters with their single-objective optimization counterparts. However, the preservation of the attractive conjugate property of search directions remains uncertain, even for quadratic cases, in multiobjective conjugate gradient methods. This loss of interpretability of … Read more

A Parametric Approach for Solving Convex Quadratic Optimization with Indicators Over Trees

This paper investigates convex quadratic optimization problems involving $n$ indicator variables, each associated with a continuous variable, particularly focusing on scenarios where the matrix $Q$ defining the quadratic term is positive definite and its sparsity pattern corresponds to the adjacency matrix of a tree graph. We introduce a graph-based dynamic programming algorithm that solves this … Read more

Learning-to-Optimize with PAC-Bayesian Guarantees: Theoretical Considerations and Practical Implementation

We use the PAC-Bayesian theory for the setting of learning-to-optimize. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first framework to learn optimization algorithms with provable generalization guarantees (PAC-Bayesian bounds) and explicit trade-off between convergence guarantees and convergence speed, which contrasts with the typical worst-case analysis. Our learned optimization algorithms provably outperform related ones … Read more

Horoballs and the subgradient method

To explore convex optimization on Hadamard spaces, we consider an iteration in the style of a subgradient algorithm. Traditionally, such methods assume that the underlying spaces are manifolds and that the objectives are geodesically convex: the methods are described using tangent spaces and exponential maps. By contrast, our iteration applies in a general Hadamard space, … Read more

Preconditioned Barzilai-Borwein Methods for Multiobjective Optimization Problems

Preconditioning is a powerful approach for solving ill-conditioned problems in optimization, where a preconditioning matrix is used to reduce the condition number and speed up the convergence of first-order method. Unfortunately, it is impossible to capture the curvature of all objective functions with a single preconditioning matrix in multiobjective optimization. Instead, second-order methods for multiobjective … Read more

Second-Order Strong Optimality and Second-Order Duality for Nonsmooth Constrained Multiobjective Fractional Programming Problems

\(\) This paper investigates constrained nonsmooth multiobjective fractional programming problem (NMFP) in real Banach spaces. It derives a quotient calculus rule for computing the first- and second-order Clarke derivatives of fractional functions involving locally Lipschitz functions. A novel second-order Abadie-type regularity condition is presented, defined with the help of the Clarke directional derivative and the … Read more

Fast convergence of the primal-dual dynamical system and algorithms for a nonsmooth bilinearly coupled saddle point problem

\(\) This paper is devoted to study the convergence rates of a second-order dynamical system and its corresponding discretizations associated with a nonsmooth bilinearly coupled convex-concave saddle point problem. We derive the convergence rate of the primal-dual gap for the second-order dynamical system with asymptotically vanishing damping term. Based on the implicit discretization, we propose … Read more

On the Out-of-Sample Performance of Stochastic Dynamic Programming and Model Predictive Control

Sample average approximation-based stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) and model predictive control (MPC) are two different methods for approaching multistage stochastic optimization. In this paper we investigate the conditions under which SDP may be outperformed by MPC. We show that, depending on the presence of concavity or convexity, MPC can be interpreted as solving a mean-constrained … Read more