We introduce a novel method for clustering using a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the Max k-Cut problem. The approach is based on a new methodology for rounding the solution of an SDP relaxation using iterated linear optimization. We show the vertices of the Max k-Cut relaxation correspond to partitions of the data into at most k sets. We also show the vertices are attractive fixed points of iterated linear optimization. Each step of this iterative process solves a relaxation of the closest vertex problem and leads to a new clustering problem where the underlying clusters are more clearly defined. Our experiments show that using fixed point iteration for rounding the Max k-Cut SDP relaxation leads to significantly better results when compared to randomized rounding.
We present an algorithm for approximating semidefinite programs with running time that is sublinear in the number of entries in the semidefinite instance. We also present lower bounds that show our algorithm to have a nearly optimal running time.
We describe a major update of our Matlab freeware GloptiPoly for parsing generalized problems of moments and solving them numerically with semidefinite programming.
Superlinear and quadratic convergence of a stabilized sequential quadratic semidefinite programming method for nonlinear semidefinite programming problems
We consider a new semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP) that may be obtained via an SDP relaxation of the more general quadratic assignment problem (QAP). We show that the new relaxation dominates the one in [D. Cvetkovic, M. Cangalovic, and V. Kovacevic-Vujcic, Semidefinite programming methods for the symmetric traveling salesman problem, in Proc. 7th Int. IPCO Conference, Springer, London, 1999, pp. 126--136]. Unlike the bound of Cvetkovic et al., the new SDP bound is not dominated by the Held-Karp linear programming bound, or vice versa.
We describe a factor-revealing convex optimization problem for the integrality gap of the maximum-cut semidefinite programming relaxation: for each $n \geq 2$ we present a convex optimization problem whose optimal value is the largest possible ratio between the value of an optimal rank-$n$ solution to the relaxation and the value of an optimal cut. This problem is then used to compute lower bounds for the integrality gap.
We consider the NP-hard problem of minimizing a convex quadratic function over the integer lattice ${\bf Z}^n$. We present a simple semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for obtaining a nontrivial lower bound on the optimal value of the problem. By interpreting the solution to the SDP relaxation probabilistically, we obtain a randomized algorithm for finding good suboptimal solutions, and thus an upper bound on the optimal value. The effectiveness of the method is shown for numerical problem instances of various sizes.
The theta bodies of a polynomial ideal are a series of semidefinite programming relaxations of the convex hull of the real variety of the ideal. In this paper we construct the theta bodies of the vanishing ideal of cycles in a binary matroid. Applied to cuts in graphs, this yields a new hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations of the cut polytope of the graph. If the binary matroid avoids certain minors we can characterize when the first theta body in the hierarchy equals the cycle polytope of the matroid. Specialized to cuts in graphs, this result solves a problem posed by Lovász.
The robust truss topology optimization against the uncertain static external load can be formulated as mixed-integer semidefinite programming. Although a global optimal solution can be computed with a branch-and-bound method, it is very time-consuming. This paper presents an alternative formulation, semidefinite programming with complementarity constraints, and proposes an efficient heuristic. The proposed method is based upon the convex-concave procedure for DC (difference-of-convex) programming. It is shown that the method can often find a practically reasonable truss design within the compu…
We propose a method for low-rank semidefinite programming in application to the semidefinite relaxation of unconstrained binary quadratic problems. The method improves an existing solution of the semidefinite programming relaxation to achieve a lower rank solution. This procedure is computationally efficient as it does not require projecting on the cone of positive-semidefinite matrices. Its performance in terms of objective improvement and rank reduction is tested over multiple graphs of large-scale Gset graph collection and over binary optimization problems from the Biq Mac collection.
Binary Integer Programming (BIP) problems are of interest due in part to the difficulty they pose and because of their various applications, including those in graph theory, combinatorial optimization and network optimization. In this note, we explicitly state the Lovasz-Schrijver Semidefinite Programming (SDP) relaxation (in primal-standard form) for a BIP problem, a relaxation that yields a tighter upper-bound than the canonical Linear Programming relaxation.
In this paper we present an extension of known semidefinite and linear programming upper bounds for spherical codes and consider a version of this bound for distance graphs. We apply the main result for the distance distribution of a spherical code.
It is known that one can solve semidefinite programs to within fixed accuracy in polynomial time using the ellipsoid method (under some assumptions). In this paper it is shown that the same holds true when one uses the short-step, primal interior point method. The main idea of the proof is to employ Diophantine approximation at each iteration to bound the intermediate bit-sizes of iterates.
Semidefinite programming (SDP) is a powerful framework from convex optimization that has striking potential for data science applications. This paper develops a provably correct randomized algorithm for solving large, weakly constrained SDP problems by economizing on the storage and arithmetic costs. Numerical evidence shows that the method is effective for a range of applications, including relaxations of MaxCut, abstract phase retrieval, and quadratic assignment. Running on a laptop equivalent, the algorithm can handle SDP instances where the matrix variable has over $10^{14}$ entries.
Disjointly constrained multilinear programming concerns the problem of maximizing a multilinear function on the product of finitely many disjoint polyhedra. While maximizing a linear function on a polytope (linear programming) is known to be solvable in polynomial time, even bilinear programming is NP-hard. Based on a reformulation of the problem in terms of sum-of-squares polynomials, we study a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations to the problem. It follows from the general theory that the sequence of optimal values converges asymptotically to the optimal value of the multilinear program. W…
This paper studies a class of so-called linear semi-infinite polynomial programming (LSIPP) problems. It is a subclass of linear semi-infinite programming problems whose constraint functions are polynomials in parameters and index sets are basic semialgebraic sets. We present a hierarchy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for LSIPP problems. Convergence rate analysis of the SDP relaxations is established based on some existing results. We show how to verify the compactness of feasible sets of LSIPP problems. In the end, we extend the SDP relaxation method to more general semi-infini…
In this paper, we study randomized and cyclic coordinate descent for convex unconstrained optimization problems. We improve the known convergence rates in some cases by using the numerical semidefinite programming performance estimation method. As a spin-off we provide a method to analyse the worst-case performance of the Gauss-Seidel iterative method for linear systems where the coefficient matrix is positive semidefinite with a positive diagonal.
In this note, we use a natural desingularization of the conormal variety of the variety of n x n symmetric matrices of rank at most r to find a general formula for the algebraic degree in semidefinite programming.
The T-product for third-order tensors has been used extensively in the literature. In this paper, we first introduce the first-order and second-order T-derivatives for the multi-vector real-valued function with the tensor T-product; and inspired by an equivalent characterization of a twice continuously T-differentiable multi-vector real-valued function being convex, we present a definition of the T-positive semidefiniteness of third-order symmetric tensors. After that, we extend many properties of positive semidefinite matrices to the case of third-order symmetric tensors. In particular, analo…
In this paper, we propose a new sequential quadratic semidefinite programming (SQSDP) method for solving degenerate nonlinear semidefinite programs (NSDPs), in which we produce iteration points by solving a sequence of stabilized quadratic semidefinite programming (QSDP) subproblems, which we derive from the minimax problem associated with the NSDP. Unlike the existing SQSDP methods, the proposed one allows us to solve those QSDP subproblems inexactly, and each QSDP is feasible. One more remarkable point of the proposed method is that constraint qualifications (CQs) or boundedness of Lagrange …
Lovasz and Schrijver, and later Lasserre, proposed hierarchies of semidefinite programming relaxations for general 0/1 linear programming problems. In this paper these two constructions are revisited and two new, block-diagonal hierarchies are proposed. They have the advantage of being computationally less costly while being at least as strong as the Lovasz-Schrijver hierarchy. Our construction is applied to the stable set problem and experimental results for Paley graphs are reported.
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 …
We propose a homogeneous primal-dual interior-point method to solve sum-of-squares optimization problems by combining non-symmetric conic optimization techniques and polynomial interpolation. The approach optimizes directly over the sum-of-squares cone and its dual, circumventing the semidefinite programming (SDP) reformulation which requires a large number of auxiliary variables. As a result, it has substantially lower theoretical time and space complexity than the conventional SDP-based approach. Although our approach avoids the semidefinite programming reformulation, an optimal solution to …
We develop a natural variant of Dikin's affine-scaling method, first for semidefinite programming and then for hyperbolic programming in general. We match the best complexity bounds known for interior-point methods. All previous polynomial-time affine-scaling algorithms have been for conic optimization problems in which the underlying cone is symmetric. Hyperbolicity cones, however, need not be symmetric. Our algorithm is the first polynomial-time affine-scaling method not relying on symmetry.
This paper focuses on the study of a mathematical program with equilibrium constraints, where the objective and the constraint functions are all polynomials. We present a method for finding its global minimizers and global minimum using a hierarchy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations and prove the convergence result for the method. Numerical experiments are presented to show the efficiency of the proposed algorithm.
The kissing number of $\mathbb{R}^n$ is the maximum number of pairwise-nonoverlapping unit spheres that can simultaneously touch a central unit sphere. Mittelmann and Vallentin (2010), based on the semidefinite programming bound of Bachoc and Vallentin (2008), computed the best known upper bounds for the kissing number for several values of $n \leq 23$. In this paper, we exploit the symmetry present in the semidefinite programming bound to provide improved upper bounds for $n = 9, \ldots, 23$.
The Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；New York University（纽约大学）
Given labeled points in a high-dimensional vector space, we seek a low-dimensional subspace such that projecting onto this subspace maintains some prescribed distance between points of differing labels. Intended applications include compressive classification. Taking inspiration from large margin nearest neighbor classification, this paper introduces a semidefinite relaxation of this problem. Unlike its predecessors, this relaxation is amenable to theoretical analysis, allowing us to provably recover a planted projection operator from the data.
The geometric measure of entanglement is a widely used entanglement measure for quantum pure states. The key problem of computation of the geometric measure is to calculate the entanglement eigenvalue, which is equivalent to computing the largest unitary eigenvalue of a corresponding complex tensor. In this paper, we propose a Jacobian semidefinite programming relaxation method to calculate the largest unitary eigenvalue of a complex tensor. For this, we first introduce the Jacobian semidefinite programming relaxation method for a polynomial optimization with equality constraint, and then conv…
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…
The smallest positive eigenvalue of the Laplacian of a network is called the spectral gap and characterizes various dynamics on networks. We propose mathematical programming methods to maximize the spectral gap of a given network by removing a fixed number of nodes. We formulate relaxed versions of the original problem using semidefinite programming and apply them to example networks.
Certifying the safety or robustness of neural networks against input uncertainties and adversarial attacks is an emerging challenge in the area of safe machine learning and control. To provide such a guarantee, one must be able to bound the output of neural networks when their input changes within a bounded set. In this paper, we propose a semidefinite programming (SDP) framework to address this problem for feed-forward neural networks with general activation functions and input uncertainty sets. Our main idea is to abstract various properties of activation functions (e.g., monotonicity, bound…
This paper studies how to solve semi-infinite polynomial programming (SIPP) problems by semidefinite relaxation method. We first introduce two SDP relaxation methods for solving polynomial optimization problems with finitely many constraints. Then we propose an exchange algorithm with SDP relaxations to solve SIPP problems with compact index set. At last, we extend the proposed method to SIPP problems with noncompact index set via homogenization. Numerical results show that the algorithm is efficient in practice.
The graph partition problem is the problem of partitioning the vertex set of a graph into a fixed number of sets of given sizes such that the sum of weights of edges joining different sets is optimized. In this paper we simplify a known matrix-lifting semidefinite programming relaxation of the graph partition problem for several classes of graphs and also show how to aggregate additional triangle and independent set constraints for graphs with symmetry. We present an eigenvalue bound for the graph partition problem of a strongly regular graph, extending a similar result for the equipartition p…
In the context of augmented Lagrangian approaches for solving semidefinite programming problems, we investigate the possibility of eliminating the positive semidefinite constraint on the dual matrix by employing a factorization. Hints on how to deal with the resulting unconstrained maximization of the augmented Lagrangian are given. We further use the approximate maximum of the augmented Lagrangian with the aim of improving the convergence rate of alternating direction augmented Lagrangian frameworks. Numerical results are reported, showing the benefits of the approach.
Carnegie-Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）
Modularity maximization has been a fundamental tool for understanding the community structure of a network, but the underlying optimization problem is nonconvex and NP-hard to solve. State-of-the-art algorithms like the Louvain or Leiden methods focus on different heuristics to help escape local optima, but they still depend on a greedy step that moves node assignment locally and is prone to getting trapped. In this paper, we propose a new class of low-cardinality algorithm that generalizes the local update to maximize a semidefinite relaxation derived from max-k-cut. This proposed algorithm i…
Since more than three decades, interior-point methods proved very useful for optimization, from linear over semidefinite to conic (and partly beyond non-convex) programming; despite the fact that already in the semidefinite case (even when strong duality holds) "hard" problems are known. We shade a light on a rather surprising restriction in the non-commutative world (of semidefinite programming), namely "commutative" paths and propose a new family of solvers that is able to use the full richness of "non-commutative" search directions: (primal) feasible-interior-point methods. Beside a detaile…
We give a hierarchy of $k$-point bounds extending the Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel linear programming $2$-point bound and the Bachoc-Vallentin semidefinite programming $3$-point bound for spherical codes. An optimized implementation of this hierarchy allows us to compute~$4$, $5$, and $6$-point bounds for the maximum number of equiangular lines in Euclidean space with a fixed common angle.
We propose a very simple preprocessing algorithm for semidefinite programming. Our algorithm inspects the constraints of the problem, deletes redundant rows and columns in the constraints, and reduces the size of the variable matrix. It often detects infeasibility. Our algorithm does not rely on any optimization solver: the only subroutine it needs is Cholesky factorization, hence it can be implemented with a few lines of code in machine precision. We present computational results on a set of problems arising mostly from polynomial optimization.
In semidefinite programming (SDP), unlike in linear programming, Farkas' lemma may fail to prove infeasibility. Here we obtain an exact, short certificate of infeasibility in SDP by an elementary approach: we reformulate any semidefinite system of the form Ai*X = bi (i=1,...,m) (P) X >= 0 using only elementary row operations, and rotations. When (P) is infeasible, the reformulated system is trivially infeasible. When (P) is feasible, the reformulated system has strong duality with its Lagrange dual for all objective functions. As a corollary, we obtain algorithms to generate the constraints of…
In 2020, Yamakawa and Okuno proposed a stabilized sequential quadratic semidefinite programming (SQSDP) method for solving, in particular, degenerate nonlinear semidefinite optimization problems. The algorithm is shown to converge globally without a constraint qualification, and it has some nice properties, including the feasible subproblems, and their possible inexact computations. In particular, the convergence was established for approximate-Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (AKKT) and trace-AKKT conditions, which are two sequential optimality conditions for the nonlinear conic contexts. However, recently…
In a common formulation of semi-infinite programs, the infinite constraint set is a requirement that a function parametrized by the decision variables is nonnegative over an interval. If this function is sufficiently closely approximable by a polynomial or a rational function, then the semi-infinite program can be reformulated as an equivalent semidefinite program. Solving this semidefinite program is challenging if the polynomials involved are of high degree, due to numerical difficulties and bad scaling arising both from the polynomial approximations and from the fact that the semidefinite p…
We study the ideal generated by polynomials vanishing on a semialgebraic set and propose an algorithm to calculate the generators, which is based on some techniques of the cylindrical algebraic decomposition. By applying these, polynomial optimization problems with polynomial equality constraints can be modified equivalently so that the associated semidefinite programming relaxation problems have no duality gap. Elementary proofs for some criteria on reality of ideals are also given.
Several algorithms are available in the literature for finding the entire set of Pareto-optimal solutions in MultiObjective Linear Programming (MOLP). However, it has not been proposed so far an interior point algorithm that finds all Pareto-optimal solutions of MOLP. We present an explicit construction, based on a transformation of any MOLP into a finite sequence of SemiDefinite Programs (SDP), the solutions of which give the entire set of Pareto-optimal extreme points solutions of MOLP. These SDP problems are solved by interior point methods; thus our approach provides a pseudo-polynomial in…
We derive a stochastic gradient algorithm for semidefinite optimization using randomization techniques. The algorithm uses subsampling to reduce the computational cost of each iteration and the subsampling ratio explicitly controls granularity, i.e. the tradeoff between cost per iteration and total number of iterations. Furthermore, the total computational cost is directly proportional to the complexity (i.e. rank) of the solution. We study numerical performance on some large-scale problems arising in statistical learning.
In contrast with many other convex optimization classes, state-of-the-art semidefinite programming solvers are yet unable to efficiently solve large scale instances. This work aims to reduce this scalability gap by proposing a novel proximal algorithm for solving general semidefinite programming problems. The proposed methodology, based on the primal-dual hybrid gradient method, allows the presence of linear inequalities without the need of adding extra slack variables and avoids solving a linear system at each iteration. More importantly, it does simultaneously compute the dual variables asso…
For $n,d,w \in \mathbb{N}$, let $A(n,d,w)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of word length $n$, minimum distance $d$ and constant weight $w$. Schrijver recently showed using semidefinite programming that $A(23,8,11)=1288$, and the second author that $A(22,8,11)=672$ and $A(22,8,10)=616$. Here we show uniqueness of the codes achieving these bounds. Let $A(n,d)$ denote the maximum size of a binary code of word length $n$ and minimum distance $d$. Gijswijt, Mittelmann and Schrijver showed that $A(20,8)=256$. We show that there are several nonisomorphic codes achieving this bound, and clas…
We propose an interior point method (IPM) for solving semidefinite programming problems (SDPs). The standard interior point algorithms used to solve SDPs work in the space of positive semidefinite matrices. Contrary to that the proposed algorithm works in the cone of matrices of constant \emph{factor width}. This adaptation makes the proposed method more suitable for parallelization than the standard IPM. We prove global convergence and provide a complexity analysis. Our work is inspired by a series of papers by Ahmadi, Dash, Majumdar and Hall, and builds upon a recent preprint by Roig-Solvas …
We present new constraint qualification conditions for nonlinear semidefinite programming that extend some of the constant rank-type conditions from nonlinear programming. As an application of these conditions, we provide a unified global convergence proof of a class of algorithms to stationary points without assuming neither uniqueness of the Lagrange multiplier nor boundedness of the Lagrange multipliers set. This class of algorithm includes, for instance, general forms of augmented Lagrangian, sequential quadratic programming, and interior point methods. We also compare these new conditions…
In this work, we derive second-order optimality conditions for nonlinear semidefinite programming (NSDP) problems, by reformulating it as an ordinary nonlinear programming problem using squared slack variables. We first consider the correspondence between Karush-Kuhn-Tucker points and regularity conditions for the general NSDP and its reformulation via slack variables. Then, we obtain a pair of "no-gap" second-order optimality conditions that are essentially equivalent to the ones already considered in the literature. We conclude with the analysis of some computational prospects of the squared…
This paper studies the problem of stability of a parameterized delay differential equations (DDE see equation (0.1)). After discretizing the DDE (0.1), we show that the problem can be equivalently casted into a semi-definite programming (SDP) see (3.2), which can be solved efficiently through some popular algorithm, e.g., the interior point method [1].
The constant rank constraint qualification, introduced by Janin in 1984 for nonlinear programming, has been extensively used for sensitivity analysis, global convergence of first- and second-order algorithms, and for computing the derivative of the value function. In this paper we discuss naive extensions of constant rank-type constraint qualifications to second-order cone programming and semidefinite programming, which are based on the Approximate-Karush-Kuhn-Tucker necessary optimality condition and on the application of the reduction approach. Our definitions are strictly weaker than Robins…
