Several well known large scale linear programming decomposition methodologies exist. Benders Decomposition, which covers the case where some small subset of variables link the otherwise separable subproblems. Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition and Lagrangian decompositions, which cover the case where some few constraints link the otherwise separable subproblems, and finally the "Cross-Decomposition" originating from TJ Van Roy which enables one to deal with both linking constraints and linking variables by essentially alternating iteratively between the Benders and the Lagrangian Decomposition. In this paper we present a novel alternative to Cross-decomposition that deals with both linking constraints and linking variables through the application of accuracy certificates for black-box, sub-gradient based algorithms such as NERML.
We revisit facial reduction from the point of view of projective geometry. This leads us to a homogenization strategy in conic programming that eliminates the phenomenon of weak infeasibility. For semidefinite programs (and others), this yields infeasibility certificates that can be checked in polynomial time. Furthermore, we propose a refined type of infeasibility, which we call stably infeasible, for which rational infeasibility certificates exist and that can be distinguished from other infeasibility types by our homogenization.
Farkas' lemma is a fundamental result from linear programming providing linear certificates for infeasibility of systems of linear inequalities. In semidefinite programming, such linear certificates only exist for strongly infeasible linear matrix inequalities. We provide nonlinear algebraic certificates for all infeasible linear matrix inequalities in the spirit of real algebraic geometry: A linear matrix inequality is infeasible if and only if -1 lies in the quadratic module associated to it. We also present a new exact duality theory for semidefinite programming, motivated by the real radic…
In conic linear programming -- in contrast to linear programming -- the Lagrange dual is not an exact dual: it may not attain its optimal value, or there may be a positive duality gap. The corresponding Farkas' lemma is also not exact (it does not always prove infeasibility). We describe exact duals, and certificates of infeasibility and weak infeasibility for conic LPs which are nearly as simple as the Lagrange dual, but do not rely on any constraint qualification. Some of our exact duals generalize the SDP duals of Ramana, and Klep and Schweighofer to the context of general conic LPs. Some o…
We consider integer programming and the semi-group membership problem. We provide the following theorem of the alternative: the system Ax=b has no nonnegative integral solution x if and only if p(b) <0 for some given polynomial p whose vector of coefficients lies in a convex cone that we characterize. We also provide a hierarchy of linear programming relaxations, where the continuous case Ax=b with x real and nonnegative, describes the first relaxation in the hierarchy.
We show that a certain tensor norm, the completely bounded norm, can be expressed by a semidefinite program. This tensor norm recently attracted attention in the field of quantum computing, where it was used by Arunachalam, Briët and Palazuelos for characterizing the quantum query complexity of Boolean functions. Combined with their results, we obtain a new characterization of the quantum query complexity through semidefinite programming. Using the duality theory of semidefinite programming we obtain a new type of certificates for large query complexity. We show that our class of certificates …
Software for mixed-integer linear programming can return incorrect results for a number of reasons, one being the use of inexact floating-point arithmetic. Even solvers that employ exact arithmetic may suffer from programming or algorithmic errors, motivating the desire for a way to produce independently verifiable certificates of claimed results. Due to the complex nature of state-of-the-art MILP solution algorithms, the ideal form of such a certificate is not entirely clear. This paper proposes such a certificate format, illustrating its capabilities and structure through examples. The certi…
Vizing's conjecture (open since 1968) relates the product of the domination numbers of two graphs to the domination number of their Cartesian product graph. In this paper, we formulate Vizing's conjecture as a Positivstellensatz existence question. In particular, we select classes of graphs according to their number of vertices and their domination number and encode the conjecture as an ideal/polynomial pair such that the polynomial is non-negative on the variety associated with the ideal if and only if the conjecture is true for this graph class. Using semidefinite programming we obtain numer…
Farkas' lemma is a fundamental result from linear programming providing linear certificates for infeasibility of systems of linear inequalities. In semidefinite programming, such linear certificates only exist for strongly infeasible linear matrix inequalities. We provide nonlinear algebraic certificates for all infeasible linear matrix inequalities in the spirit of real algebraic geometry. More precisely, we show that a linear matrix inequality is infeasible if and only if -1 lies in the quadratic module associated to it. We prove exponential degree bounds for the corresponding algebraic cert…
We describe a general and safe computational framework that provides integer programming results with the degree of certainty that is required for machine-assisted proofs of mathematical theorems. At its core, the framework relies on a rational branch-and-bound certificate produced by an exact integer programming solver, SCIP, in order to circumvent floating-point roundoff errors present in most state-of-the-art solvers for mixed-integer programs. The resulting certificates are self-contained and checker software exists that can verify their correctness independently of the integer programming…
Certifying the stability of dynamical systems is a central and challenging task in control theory and systems analysis. To tackle these problems we present an algorithmic approach to finding polynomial Lyapunov functions. Our method relies on sums of nonnegative circuit functions (SONC), a certificate of nonnegativity of real polynomials. We show that both the problem of verifying as well as the more difficult task of finding Lyapunov functions can be carried out via relative entropy programming when using SONC certificates. This approach is analogue yet independent to finding Lyapunov functio…
Finding the minimum of a multivariate real polynomial is a well-known hard problem with various applications. We present a polynomial time algorithm to approximate such lower bounds via sums of nonnegative circuit polynomials (SONC). As a main result, we carry out the first large-scale comparison of SONC, using this algorithm and different geometric programming (GP) solvers, with the classical sums of squares (SOS) approach, using several of the most common semidefinite programming (SDP) solvers. SONC yields bounds competitive to SOS in several cases, but using significantly less time and memo…
A barrier certificate is an inductive invariant function which can be used for the safety verification of a hybrid system. Safety verification based on barrier certificate has the benefit of avoiding explicit computation of the exact reachable set which is usually intractable for nonlinear hybrid systems. In this paper, we propose a new barrier certificate condition, called Exponential Condition, for the safety verification of semi-algebraic hybrid systems. The most important benefit of Exponential Condition is that it has a lower conservativeness than the existing convex condition and meanwhi…
We introduce a general technique to create an extended formulation of a mixed-integer program. We classify the integer variables into blocks, each of which generates a finite set of vector values. The extended formulation is constructed by creating a new binary variable for each generated value. Initial experiments show that the extended formulation can have a more compact complete description than the original formulation. We prove that, using this reformulation technique, the facet description decomposes into one ``linking polyhedron'' per block and the ``aggregated polyhedron''. Each of the…
We study the problem of detecting infeasibility of large-scale linear programming problems using the primal-dual hybrid gradient method (PDHG) of Chambolle and Pock (2011). The literature on PDHG has mostly focused on settings where the problem at hand is assumed to be feasible. When the problem is not feasible, the iterates of the algorithm do not converge. In this scenario, we show that the iterates diverge at a controlled rate towards a well-defined ray. The direction of this ray is known as the infimal displacement vector $v$. The first contribution of our work is to prove that this vector…
We introduce Newton-ADMM, a method for fast conic optimization. The basic idea is to view the residuals of consecutive iterates generated by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) as a set of fixed point equations, and then use a nonsmooth Newton method to find a solution; we apply the basic idea to the Splitting Cone Solver (SCS), a state-of-the-art method for solving generic conic optimization problems. We demonstrate theoretically, by extending the theory of semismooth operators, that Newton-ADMM converges rapidly (i.e., quadratically) to a solution; empirically, Newton-ADMM…
Assessing non-negativity of multivariate polynomials over the reals, through the computation of {\em certificates of non-negativity}, is a topical issue in polynomial optimization. This is usually tackled through the computation of {\em sums-of-squares decompositions} which rely on efficient numerical solvers for semi-definite programming. This method faces two difficulties. The first one is that the certificates obtained this way are {\em approximate} and then non-exact. The second one is due to the fact that not all non-negative polynomials are sums-of-squares. In this paper, we build on pre…
In this article we combine two developments in polynomial optimization. On the one hand, we consider nonnegativity certificates based on sums of nonnegative circuit polynomials, which were recently introduced by the second and the third author. On the other hand, we investigate geometric programming methods for constrained polynomial optimization problems, which were recently developed by Ghasemi and Marshall. We show that the combination of both results yields a new method to solve certain classes of constrained polynomial optimization problems. We test the new method experimentally and compa…
The objective of this work is to study weak infeasibility in second order cone programming. For this purpose, we consider a relaxation sequence of feasibility problems that mostly preserve the feasibility status of the original problem. This is used to show that for a given weakly infeasible problem at most $m$ directions are needed to approach the cone, where $m$ is the number of Lorentz cones. We also tackle a closely related question and show that given a bounded optimization problem satisfying Slater's condition, we may transform it into another problem that has the same optimal value but …
We propose a supervised learning framework for computing solutions of multi-parametric Mixed Integer Linear Programs (MILPs) that arise in Model Predictive Control. Our approach also quantifies sub-optimality for the computed solutions. Inspired by Branch-and-Bound techniques, the key idea is to train a Neural Network/Random Forest, which for a given parameter, predicts a strategy consisting of (1) a set of Linear Programs (LPs) such that their feasible sets form a partition of the feasible set of the MILP and (2) a candidate integer solution. For control computation and sub-optimality quantif…
Using the dual cone of sums of nonnegative circuits (SONC), we provide a relaxation of the global optimization problem to minimize an exponential sum and, as a special case, a multivariate real polynomial. Our approach builds on two key observations. First, that the dual SONC cone is contained in the primal one. Hence, containment in this cone is a certificate of nonnegativity. Second, we show that membership in the dual cone can be verified by a linear program. We implement the algorithm and present initial experimental results comparing our method to existing approaches.
The cone of sums of nonnegative circuits (SONCs) is a subset of the cone of nonnegative polynomials / exponential sums, which has been studied extensively in recent years. In this article, we construct a subset of the SONC cone which we call the DSONC cone. The DSONC cone can be seen as an extension of the dual SONC cone; membership can be tested via linear programming. We show that the DSONC cone is a proper, full-dimensional cone, we provide a description of its extreme rays, and collect several properties that parallel those of the SONC cone. Moreover, we show that functions in the DSONC co…
Yuan's theorem of the alternative is an important theoretical tool in optimization, which provides a checkable certificate for the infeasibility of a strict inequality system involving two homogeneous quadratic functions. In this paper, we provide a tractable extension of Yuan's theorem of the alternative to the symmetric tensor setting. As an application, we establish that the optimal value of a class of nonconvex polynomial optimization problems with suitable sign structure (or more explicitly, with essentially non-positive coefficients) can be computed by a related convex conic programming …
We study the problem of computing outer bounds for the region of steady states of biochemical reaction networks modelled by ordinary differential equations, with respect to parameters that are allowed to vary within a predefined region. Using a relaxed version of the corresponding feasibility problem and its Lagrangian dual, we show how to compute certificates for regions in state space not containing any steady states. Based on these results, we develop an algorithm to compute outer bounds for the region of all feasible steady states. We apply our algorithm to the sensitivity analysis of a Go…
The facial reduction algorithm of Borwein and Wolkowicz and the extended dual of Ramana provide a strong dual for the conic linear program $$ (P) \sup {<c, x> | Ax \leq_K b} $$ in the absence of any constraint qualification. The facial reduction algorithm solves a sequence of auxiliary optimization problems to obtain such a dual. Ramana's dual is applicable when (P) is a semidefinite program (SDP) and is an explicit SDP itself. Ramana, Tuncel, and Wolkowicz showed that these approaches are closely related; in particular, they proved the correctness of Ramana's dual using certificates from a fa…
The work of Wachter and Biegler suggests that infeasible-start interior point methods (IPMs) developed for linear programming cannot be adapted to nonlinear optimization without significant modification, i.e., using a two-phase or penalty method. We propose an IPM that, by careful initialization and updates of the slack variables, is guaranteed to find a first-order certificate of local infeasibility, local optimality or unboundedness of the (shifted) feasible region. Our proposed algorithm differs from other IPM methods for nonconvex programming because we reduce primal feasibility at the sam…
Principal component analysis (PCA) is one of the most widely used dimensionality reduction tools in data analysis. The PCA direction is a linear combination of all features with nonzero loadings -- this impedes interpretability. Sparse PCA (SPCA) is a framework that enhances interpretability by incorporating an additional sparsity requirement in the feature weights. However, unlike PCA, the SPCA problem is NP-hard. Most conventional methods for solving SPCA are heuristics with no guarantees, such as certificates of optimality on the solution-quality via associated dual bounds. Dual bounds are …
In this paper we consider the safety verification and safe controller synthesis problems for nonlinear control systems. The Control Barrier Certificates (CBC) approach is proposed as an extension to the Barrier certificates approach. Our approach can be used to characterize the control invariance of a given set in terms of safety of a general nonlinear control system subject to input constraints. From the point of view of controller design, the proposed method provides an approach to synthesize a safe control law that guarantees that the trajectories of the system starting from a given initial…
Template abstract domains allow to express more interesting properties than classical abstract domains. However, template generation is a challenging problem when one uses template abstract domains for program analysis. In this paper, we relate template generation with the program properties that we want to prove. We focus on one-loop programs with nested conditional branches. We formally define the notion of well-representative template basis with respect to such programs and a given property. The definition relies on the fact that template abstract domains produce inductive invariants. We sh…
