On the acceleration of the Barzilai-Borwein method

The Barzilai-Borwein (BB) gradient method is efficient for solving large-scale unconstrained problems to the modest accuracy and has a great advantage of being easily extended to solve a wide class of constrained optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a new stepsize to accelerate the BB method by requiring finite termination for minimizing two-dimensional strongly … Read more

Dynamic programming for the time-dependent traveling salesman problem with time windows

The recent growth of direct-to-consumer deliveries has stressed the importance of last-mile logistics, becoming one of the critical factors in city planning. One of the key factors lies in the last-mile deliveries, reaching in some cases nearly 50% of the overall parcel delivery cost. Different variants of the the well-known Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) arise … Read more

Exact semidefinite programming bounds for packing problems

In this paper we give an algorithm to round the floating point output of a semidefinite programming solver to a solution over the rationals or a quadratic extension of the rationals. We apply this to get sharp bounds for packing problems, and we use these sharp bounds to prove that certain optimal packing configurations are … Read more

Lossless Compression of Deep Neural Networks

Deep neural networks have been successful in many predictive modeling tasks, such as image and language recognition, where large neural networks are often used to obtain good accuracy. Consequently, it is challenging to deploy these networks under limited computational resources, such as in mobile devices. In this work, we introduce an algorithm that removes units … Read more

Achieving Consistency with Cutting Planes

Cutting planes accelerate branch-and-bound search primarily by cutting off fractional solutions of the linear programming (LP) relaxation, resulting in tighter bounds for pruning the search tree. Yet cutting planes can also reduce backtracking by excluding inconsistent partial assignments that occur in the course of branching. A partial assignment is inconsistent with a constraint set when … Read more

Data-Driven Two-Stage Conic Optimization with Zero-One Uncertainties

We address high-dimensional zero-one random parameters in two-stage convex conic optimization problems. Such parameters typically represent failures of network elements and constitute rare, high-impact random events in several applications. Given a sparse training dataset of the parameters, we motivate and study a distributionally robust formulation of the problem using a Wasserstein ambiguity set centered at … Read more

Joint Pricing and Production: A Fusion of Machine Learning and Robust Optimization

We integrate machine learning with distributionally robust optimization to address a two-period problem for the joint pricing and production of multiple items. First, we generalize the additive demand model to capture both cross-product and cross-period effects as well as the demand dependence across periods. Next, we apply K-means clustering to the demand residual mapping based … Read more

Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming for Multistage Stochastic Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Optimization

In this paper, we study multistage stochastic mixed-integer nonlinear programs (MS-MINLP). This general class of problems encompasses, as important special cases, multistage stochastic convex optimization with \emph{non-Lipschitz-continuous} value functions and multistage stochastic mixed-integer linear optimization. We develop stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) type algorithms with nested decomposition, deterministic sampling, and stochastic sampling. The key ingredient … Read more

Lagrangian Dual Decision Rules for Multistage Stochastic Mixed Integer Programming

Multistage stochastic programs can be approximated by restricting policies to follow decision rules. Directly applying this idea to problems with integer decisions is difficult because of the need for decision rules that lead to integral decisions. In this work, we introduce Lagrangian dual decision rules (LDDRs) for multistage stochastic mixed integer programming (MSMIP) which overcome … Read more

Quasi-Monte Carlo methods for two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programs

We consider randomized QMC methods for approximating the expected recourse in two-stage stochastic optimization problems containing mixed-integer decisions in the second stage. It is known that the second-stage optimal value function is piecewise linear-quadratic with possible kinks and discontinuities at the boundaries of certain convex polyhedral sets. This structure is exploited to provide conditions implying … Read more