This paper concerns a method for finding the minimum of a polynomial on a semialgebraic set, i.e., a set in $\re^m$ defined by finitely many polynomial equations and inequalities, using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system and sum of squares (SOS) relaxations. This generalizes results in the recent paper \cite{njw_grad}, which considers minimizing polynomials on algebraic sets, i.e., sets in $\re^m$ defined by finitely many polynomial equations. Most of the theorems and conclusions in \cite{njw_grad} generalize to semialgebraic sets, even in the case where the semialgebraic set is not compact. We discuss the method in some special cases, namely, when the semialgebraic set is contained in the nonnegative orthant $\re^n_+$ or in box constraints $[a,b]_n$. These constraints make the computations more efficient.
A classical result from topology called Uryshon's lemma asserts the existence of a continuous separator of two disjoint closed sets in a sufficiently regular topological space. In this work we make a search for this separator constructive and efficient in the context of real algebraic geometry. Namely, given two compact disjoint basic semialgebraic sets which are contained in an $n$-dimensional box, we provide an algorithm that computes a separating polynomial greater than or equal to 1 on the first set and less than or equal to 0 on the second one.
Motivated by problems of uncertainty propagation and robust estimation we are interested in computing a polynomial sublevel set of fixed degree and minimum volume that contains a given semialgebraic set K. At this level of generality this problem is not tractable, even though it becomes convex e.g. when restricted to nonnegative homogeneous polynomials. Our contribution is to describe and justify a tractable L^1-norm or trace heuristic for this problem, relying upon hierarchies of linear matrix inequality (LMI) relaxations when K is semialgebraic, and simplifying to linear programming (LP) whe…
Moment-sum-of-squares hierarchies of semidefinite programs can be used to approximate the volume of a given compact basic semialgebraic set K. The idea consists of approximating from above the indicator function of K with a sequence of polynomials of increasing degree d, so that the integrals of these polynomials generate a convergence sequence of upper bounds on the volume of K. We show that the asymptotic rate of this convergence is at least O(1/ log log d).
We propose efficient techniques for generating independent identically distributed uniform random samples inside semialgebraic sets. The proposed algorithm leverages recent results on the approximation of indicator functions by polynomials %\cite{DabHen:13} to develop acceptance/rejection based sample generation algorithms with guaranteed performance in terms of rejection rate (the number of samples that should be generated in order to obtain an accepted sample). Moreover, the {acceptance} rate is shown to be is asymptotically optimal, in the sense that it tends to one (all samples accepted) a…
10 years ago or so Bill Helton introduced me to some mathematical problems arising from semidefinite programming. This paper is a partial account of what was and what is happening with one of these problems, including many open questions and some new results.
In this paper we show that Sum-of-Squares optimization can be used to find optimal semialgebraic representations of sets. These sets may be explicitly defined, as in the case of discrete points or unions of sets; or implicitly defined, as in the case of attractors of nonlinear systems. We define optimality in the sense of minimum volume, while satisfying constraints that can include set containment, convexity, or Lyapunov stability conditions. Our admittedly heuristic approach to volume minimization is based on the use of a determinantlike objective function. We provide numerical examples for …
In this paper, we study the problem of computing by relaxation hierarchies the infimum of a real polynomial function f on a closed basic semialgebraic set and the points where this infimum is reached, if they exist. We show that when the infimum is reached, a relaxation hierarchy constructed from the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker ideal is always exact and that the vanishing ideal of the KKT minimizer points is generated by the kernel of the associated moment matrix in that degree, even if this ideal is not zero-dimensional. We also show that this relaxation allows to detect when there is no KKT minimizer…
In a first contribution, we revisit two certificates of positivity on (possibly non-compact) basic semialgebraic sets due to Putinar and Vasilescu [Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences-Series I-Mathematics, 328(6) (1999) pp. 495-499]. We use Jacobi's technique from [Mathematische Zeitschrift, 237(2) (2001) pp. 259-273] to provide an alternative proof with an effective degree bound on the sums of squares multipliers in such certificates. As a consequence, it allows one to define a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations for a general polynomial optimization problem. Convergence of this hiera…
We consider the problem of approximating a semialgebraic set with a sublevel-set of a polynomial function. In this setting, it is standard to seek a minimum volume outer approximation and/or maximum volume inner approximation. As there is no known relationship between the coefficients of an arbitrary polynomial and the volume of its sublevel sets, previous works have proposed heuristics based on the determinant and trace objectives commonly used in ellipsoidal fitting. For the case of star-convex semialgebraic sets, we propose a novel objective which yields both an outer and an inner approxima…
Consider a finite system of non-strict real polynomial inequalities and suppose its solution set $S\subseteq\mathbb R^n$ is convex, has nonempty interior and is compact. Suppose that the system satisfies the Archimedean condition, which is slightly stronger than the compactness of $S$. Suppose that each defining polynomial satisfies a second order strict quasiconcavity condition where it vanishes on $S$ (which is very natural because of the convexity of $S$) or its Hessian has a certain matrix sums of squares certificate for negative-semidefiniteness on $S$ (fulfilled trivially by linear polyn…
Given a compact semialgebraic set S of R^n and a polynomial map f from R^n to R^m, we consider the problem of approximating the image set F = f(S) in R^m. This includes in particular the projection of S on R^m for n greater than m. Assuming that F is included in a set B which is "simple" (e.g. a box or a ball), we provide two methods to compute certified outer approximations of F. Method 1 exploits the fact that F can be defined with an existential quantifier, while Method 2 computes approximations of the support of image measures.The two methods output a sequence of superlevel sets defined wi…
In this paper, "chance optimization" problems are introduced, where one aims at maximizing the probability of a set defined by polynomial inequalities. These problems are, in general, nonconvex and computationally hard. With the objective of developing systematic numerical procedures to solve such problems, a sequence of convex relaxations based on the theory of measures and moments is provided, whose sequence of optimal values is shown to converge to the optimal value of the original problem. Indeed, we provide a sequence of semidefinite programs of increasing dimension which can arbitrarily …
Degree Bounds for Positivstellensätze of general semialgebraic sets
Econometric Institute, Erasmus University Rotterdam（伊拉斯谟斯鹿特丹大学计量经济研究所）；Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University（蒂尔堡大学经济与管理学院）；Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Lehigh University（利哈伊大学工业与系统工程系）
Convex inner approximations of nonconvex semialgebraic sets applied to fixed-order controller design
CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心；实验室分析与系统研究所）；LAAS（图卢兹大学）；Université de Toulouse（捷克布拉格捷克理工大学电气工程学院）；UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE；UT1, UTM, LAAS；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague
This work is concerned with different aspects of spectrahedra and their projections, sets that are important in semidefinite optimization. We prove results on the limitations of so called Lasserre and theta body relaxation methods for semialgebraic sets and varieties. As a special case we obtain the main result of the paper "Exposed faces of semidefinite representable sets" of Netzer, Plaumann and Schweighofer. We also solve the open problems from that work. We further prove some helpful facts which can not be found in the existing literature, for example that the closure of a projection of a …
Simple Approximations of Semialgebraic Sets and their Applications to Control
CNR-IEIIT（意大利国家研究委员会工业工程研究所）；Politecnico di Torino（都灵理工大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；LAAS（图卢兹系统分析与实验室）；Université de Toulouse（图卢兹大学）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学电气工程学院）；Electrical Engineering Department, The Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学电气工程系）
We consider the problem of the semidefinite representation of a class of non-compact basic semialgebraic sets. We introduce the conditions of pointedness and closedness at infinity of a semialgebraic set and show that under these conditions our modified hierarchies of nested theta bodies and Lasserre's relaxations converge to the closure of the convex hull of $S$. Moreover, if the PP-BDR property is satisfied, our theta body and Lasserre's relaxation are exact when the order is large enough; if the PP-BDR property does not hold, our hierarchies convergent uniformly to the closure of the convex…
Motivated by applications in robotics and computer vision, we study problems related to spatial reasoning of a 3D environment using sublevel sets of polynomials. These include: tightly containing a cloud of points (e.g., representing an obstacle) with convex or nearly-convex basic semialgebraic sets, computation of Euclidean distances between two such sets, separation of two convex basic semalgebraic sets that overlap, and tight containment of the union of several basic semialgebraic sets with a single convex one. We use algebraic techniques from sum of squares optimization that reduce all the…
Consider the problem of minimizing a quadratic objective subject to quadratic equations. We study the semialgebraic region of objective functions for which this problem is solved by its semidefinite relaxation. For the Euclidean distance problem, this is a bundle of spectrahedral shadows surrounding the given variety. We characterize the algebraic boundary of this region and we derive a formula for its degree.
We introduce tropical spectrahedra, defined as the images by the nonarchimedean valuation of spectrahedra over the field of real Puiseux series. We provide an explicit polyhedral characterization of generic tropical spectrahedra, involving principal tropical minors of size at most 2. One of the key ingredients is Denef-Pas quantifier elimination result over valued fields. We obtain from this that the nonarchimedean valuation maps semialgebraic sets to semilinear sets that are closed. We also prove that, under a regularity assumption, the image by the valuation of a basic semialgebraic set is o…
A set $S\subseteq \re^n$ is called to be {\it Semidefinite (SDP)} representable if $S$ equals the projection of a set in higher dimensional space which is describable by some Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI). The contributions of this paper are: (i) For bounded SDP representable sets $W_1,...,W_m$, we give an explicit construction of an SDP representation for $\cv{\cup_{k=1}^mW_k}$. This provides a technique for building global SDP representations from the local ones. (ii) For the SDP representability of a compact convex semialgebraic set $S$, we prove sufficient condition: the boundary $\bdS$ i…
We consider the problem of approximating the reachable set of a discrete-time polynomial system from a semialgebraic set of initial conditions under general semialgebraic set constraints. Assuming inclusion in a given simple set like a box or an ellipsoid, we provide a method to compute certified outer approximations of the reachable set. The proposed method consists of building a hierarchy of relaxations for an infinite-dimensional moment problem. Under certain assumptions, the optimal value of this problem is the volume of the reachable set and the optimum solution is the restriction of the …
The free closed semialgebraic set $D_f$ determined by a hermitian noncommutative polynomial $f$ is the closure of the connected component of $\{(X,X^*)\mid f(X,X^*)>0\}$ containing the origin. When $L$ is a hermitian monic linear pencil, the free closed semialgebraic set $D_L$ is the feasible set of the linear matrix inequality $L(X,X^*)\geq 0$ and is known as a free spectrahedron. Evidently these are convex and it is well-known that a free closed semialgebraic set is convex if and only it is a free spectrahedron. The main result of this paper solves the basic problem of determining those $f$ …
The paper addresses parametric inequality systems described by polynomial functions in finite dimensions, where state-dependent infinite parameter sets are given by finitely many polynomial inequalities and equalities. Such systems can be viewed, in particular, as solution sets to problems of generalized semi-infinite programming with polynomial data. Exploiting the imposed polynomial structure together with powerful tools of variational analysis and semialgebraic geometry, we establish a far-going extension of the Łojasiewicz gradient inequality to the general nonsmooth class of supremum marg…
Let V be a semialgebraic set parameterized by quadratic polynomials over a quadratic set T. This paper studies semidefinite representation of its convex hull by projections of spectrahedra (defined by linear matrix inequalities). When T is defined by a single quadratic constraint, we prove that its convex hull is equal to the first order moment type semidefinite relaxation of $V$, up to taking closures. Similar results hold when every quadratic polynomial is homogeneous and T is defined by two homogeneous quadratic constraints,or V is defined by rational quadratic parameterizations.
Mines Albi（阿尔比矿业学院）；Institut Clément Ader (ICA)（克莱门特·阿登研究所）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心；图卢兹实验室分析与系统研究）；LAAS（图卢兹大学；图卢兹第三大学；国立应用科学学院；国立高等航空航天学院；图卢兹实验室分析与系统研究）；Université de Toulouse（捷克布拉格捷克理工大学电气工程学院）；UPS, INSA, INP, ISAE（图卢兹大学图卢兹数学研究所）；LAAS；Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague；Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse (IMT), Université de Toulouse
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…
This is the first of a two part paper investigating the geometry of the integrator reach sets, and the applications thereof. In this Part I, assuming box-valued input uncertainties, we establish that this compact convex reach set is semialgebraic, translated zonoid, and not a spectrahedron. We derive the parametric as well as the implicit representation of the boundary of this reach set. We also deduce the closed form formula for the volume and diameter of this set, and discuss their scaling with state dimension and time. We point out that these results may be utilized in benchmarking the perf…
This article describes a method to compute successive convex approximations of the convex hull of a set of points in R^n that are the solutions to a system of polynomial equations over the reals. The method relies on sums of squares of polynomials and the dual theory of moment matrices. The main feature of the technique is that all computations are done modulo the ideal generated by the polynomials defining the set to the convexified. This work was motivated by questions raised by Lovász concerning extensions of the theta body of a graph to arbitrary real algebraic varieties, and hence the rel…
Over-approximating the forward reach sets of controlled dynamical systems subject to set-valued uncertainties is a common practice in systems-control engineering for the purpose of performance verification. However, specific algebraic and topological results for the geometry of such sets are rather uncommon even for simple linear systems such as the integrators. This work explores the geometry of the forward reach set of the integrator dynamics subject to box-valued uncertainties in its control inputs. Our contribution includes derivation of a closed-form formula for the support functions of t…
We consider the problem of overbounding and underbounding both the backward and forward reachable set for a given polynomial vector field, nonlinear in both state and input, with a given semialgebriac set of initial conditions and with inputs constrained pointwise to lie in a semialgebraic set. Specifically, we represent the forward reachable set using the value function which gives the optimal cost to go of an optimal control problems and if smooth satisfies the Hamilton-Jacobi- Bellman PDE. We then show that there exist polynomial upper and lower bounds to this value function and furthermore…
