Semidefinite approximations for bicliques and biindependent pairs

\(\) We investigate some graph parameters dealing with biindependent pairs $(A,B)$ in a bipartite graph $G=(V_1\cup V_2,E)$, i.e., pairs $(A,B)$ where $A\subseteq V_1$, $B\subseteq V_2$ and $A\cup B$ is independent. These parameters also allow to study bicliques in general graphs. When maximizing the cardinality $|A\cup B|$ one finds the stability number $\alpha(G)$, well-known to be … Read more

On solving the MAX-SAT using sum of squares

We consider semidefinite programming (SDP) approaches for solving the maximum satisfiabilityproblem (MAX-SAT) and the weighted partial MAX-SAT. It is widely known that SDP is well-suitedto approximate the (MAX-)2-SAT. Our work shows the potential of SDP also for other satisfiabilityproblems, by being competitive with some of the best solvers in the yearly MAX-SAT competition.Our solver combines … Read more

Polynomial argmin for recovery and approximation of multivariate discontinuous functions

We propose to approximate a (possibly discontinuous) multivariate function f(x) on a compact set by the partial minimizer arg min_y p(x,y) of an appropriate polynomial p whose construction can be cast in a univariate sum of squares (SOS) framework, resulting in a highly structured convex semidefinite program. In a number of non-trivial cases (e.g. when … Read more

A Note on Semidefinite Representable Reformulations for Two Variants of the Trust-Region Subproblem

Motivated by encouraging numerical results in the literature, in this note we consider two specific variants of the trust-region subproblem and provide exact semidefinite representable reformulations. The first is over the intersection of two balls; the second is over the intersection of a ball and a special second-order conic representable set. Different from the technique … Read more

Linear optimization over homogeneous matrix cones

A convex cone is homogeneous if its automorphism group acts transitively on the interior of the cone, i.e., for every pair of points in the interior of the cone, there exists a cone automorphism that maps one point to the other. Cones that are homogeneous and self-dual are called symmetric. The symmetric cones include the … Read more

A Strengthened SDP Relaxation for Quadratic Optimization Over the Stiefel Manifold

We study semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for the NP-hard problem of globally optimizing a quadratic function over the Stiefel manifold. We introduce a strengthened relaxation based on two recent ideas in the literature: (i) a tailored SDP for objectives with a block-diagonal Hessian; (ii) and the use of the Kronecker matrix product to construct SDP relaxations. Using synthetic instances on … Read more

The exact worst-case convergence rate of the alternating direction method of multipliers

Recently, semidefinite programming performance estimation has been employed as a strong tool for the worst-case performance analysis of first order methods. In this paper, we derive new non-ergodic convergence rates for the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) by using performance estimation. We give some examples which show the exactness of the given bounds. We … Read more

Partitioning through projections: strong SDP bounds for large graph partition problems

The graph partition problem (GPP) aims at clustering the vertex set of a graph into a fixed number of disjoint subsets of given sizes such that the sum of weights of edges joining different sets is minimized. This paper investigates the quality of doubly nonnegative (DNN) relaxations, i.e., relaxations having matrix variables that are both … Read more

Solving Two-Trust-Region Subproblems using Semidefinite Optimization with Eigenvector Branching

Semidefinite programming (SDP) problems typically utilize the constraint that X-xx’ is PSD to obtain a convex relaxation of the condition X=xx’, where x is an n-vector. In this paper we consider a new hyperplane branching method for SDP based on using an eigenvector of X-xx’. This branching technique is related to previous work of Saxeena, … Read more

A barrier Lagrangian dual method for multi-stage stochastic convex semidefinite optimization

In this paper, we present a polynomial-time barrier algorithm for solving multi-stage stochastic convex semidefinite optimization based on the Lagrangian dual method which relaxes the nonanticipativity constraints. We show that the barrier Lagrangian dual functions for our setting form self-concordant families with respect to barrier parameters. We also use the barrier function method to improve … Read more