An accelerated HPE-type algorithm for a class of composite convex-concave saddle-point problems

This article proposes a new algorithm for solving a class of composite convex-concave saddle-point problems. The new algorithm is a special instance of the hybrid proximal extragradient framework in which a Nesterov’s accelerated variant is used to approximately solve the prox subproblems. One of the advantages of the new method is that it works for … Read more

Improving the integer L-shaped method

We consider the integer L-shaped method for two-stage stochastic integer programs. To improve the performance of the algorithm, we present and combine two strategies. First, to avoid time-consuming exact evaluations of the second-stage cost function, we propose a simple modification that alternates between linear and mixed-integer subproblems. Then, to better approximate the shape of the … Read more

Stochastic Quasi-Fejér Block-Coordinate Fixed Point Iterations with Random Sweeping

This work investigates the properties of stochastic quasi-Fejér monotone sequences in Hilbert spaces and emphasizes their pertinence in the study of the convergence of block-coordinate fixed point methods. The iterative methods under investigation feature random sweeping rules to select the blocks of variables that are activated over the course of the iterations and allow for … Read more

Copositivity-based approximations for mixed-integer fractional quadratic optimization

We propose a copositive reformulation of the mixed-integer fractional quadratic problem (MIFQP) under general linear constraints. This problem class arises naturally in many applications, e.g., for optimizing communication or social networks, or studying game theory problems arising from genetics. It includes several APX-hard subclasses: the maximum cut problem, the $k$-densest subgraph problem and several of … Read more

An LP-based Algorithm to Test Copositivity

A symmetric matrix is called copositive if it generates a quadratic form taking no negative values over the nonnegative orthant, and the linear optimization problem over the set of copositive matrices is called the copositive programming problem. Recently, many studies have been done on the copositive programming problem (see, for example, \cite{aDUR10, aBOMZE12}). Among others, … Read more

Validating Sample Average Approximation Solutions with Negatively Dependent Batches

Sample-average approximations (SAA) are a practical means of finding approximate solutions of stochastic programming problems involving an extremely large (or infinite) number of scenarios. SAA can also be used to find estimates of a lower bound on the optimal objective value of the true problem which, when coupled with an upper bound, provides confidence intervals … Read more

Forward – Backward Greedy Algorithms for Atomic – Norm Regularization

In many signal processing applications, one aims to reconstruct a signal that has a simple representation with respect to a certain basis or frame. Fundamental elements of the basis known as “atoms” allow us to define “atomic norms” that can be used to construct convex regularizers for the reconstruction problem. Efficient algorithms are available to … Read more

How important are branching decisions: fooling MIP solvers

We show the importance of selecting good branching variables by exhibiting a family of instances for which an optimal solution is both trivial to find and provably optimal by a fixed-size branch-and-bound tree, but for which state-of-the-art Mixed Integer Programming solvers need an increasing amount of resources. The instances encode the edge-coloring problem on a … Read more

Minimal Points, Variational Principles, and Variable Preferences in Set Optimization

The paper is devoted to variational analysis of set-valued mappings acting from quasimetric spaces into topological spaces with variable ordering structures. Besides the mathematical novelty, our motivation comes from applications to adaptive dynamical models of behavioral sciences. We develop a unified dynamical approach to variational principles in such settings based on the new minimal point … Read more

Convergence Rates with Inexact Nonexpansive Operators

In this paper, we present a convergence rate analysis for the inexact Krasnosel’ski{\u{\i}}-Mann iteration built from nonexpansive operators. Our results include two main parts: we first establish global pointwise and ergodic iteration-complexity bounds, and then, under a metric subregularity assumption, we establish local linear convergence for the distance of the iterates to the set of … Read more