No Arabic abstract
Convexification based on convex envelopes is ubiquitous in the non-linear optimization literature. Thanks to considerable efforts of the optimization community for decades, we are able to compute the convex envelopes of a considerable number of functions that appear in practice, and thus obtain tight and tractable approximations to challenging problems. We contribute to this line of work by considering a family of functions that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been considered before in the literature. We call this family ray-concave functions. We show sufficient conditions that allow us to easily compute closed-form expressions for the convex envelope of ray-concave functions over arbitrary polytopes. With these tools, we are able to provide new perspectives to previously known convex envelopes and derive a previously unknown convex envelope for a function that arises in probability contexts.
In this paper we introduce disciplined convex-concave programming (DCCP), which combines the ideas of disciplined convex programming (DCP) with convex-concave programming (CCP). Convex-concave programming is an organized heuristic for solving nonconvex problems that involve objective and constraint functions that are a sum of a convex and a concave term. DCP is a structured way to define convex optimization problems, based on a family of basic convex and concave functions and a few rules for combining them. Problems expressed using DCP can be automatically converted to standard form and solved by a generic solver; widely used implementations include YALMIP, CVX, CVXPY, and Convex.jl. In this paper we propose a framework that combines the two ideas, and includes two improvements over previously published work on convex-concave programming, specifically the handling of domains of the functions, and the issue of nondifferentiability on the boundary of the domains. We describe a Python implementation called DCCP, which extends CVXPY, and give examples.
For positive semidefinite matrices $A$ and $B$, Ando and Zhan proved the inequalities $||| f(A)+f(B) ||| ge ||| f(A+B) |||$ and $||| g(A)+g(B) ||| le ||| g(A+B) |||$, for any unitarily invariant norm, and for any non-negative operator monotone $f$ on
Given its wide spectrum of applications, the classical problem of all-terminal network reliability evaluation remains a highly relevant problem in network design. The associated optimization problem -- to find a network with the best possible reliability under multiple constraints -- presents an even more complex challenge, which has been addressed in the scientific literature but usually under strong assumptions over failures probabilities and/or the network topology. In this work, we propose a novel reliability optimization framework for network design with failures probabilities that are independent but not necessarily identical. We leverage the linear-time evaluation procedure for network reliability in the series-parallel graphs of Satyanarayana and Wood(1985) to formulate the reliability optimization problem as a mixed-integer nonlinear optimization problem. To solve this nonconvex problem, we use classical convex envelopes of bilinear functions, introduce custom cutting planes, and propose a new family of convex envelopes for expressions that appear in the evaluation of network reliability. Furthermore, we exploit the refinements produced by spatial branch-and-bound to locally strengthen our convex relaxations. Our experiments show that, using our framework, one can efficiently obtain optimal solutions in challenging instances of this problem.
Minimax optimization problems are an important class of optimization problems arising from modern machine learning and traditional research areas. While there have been many numerical algorithms for solving smooth convex-concave minimax problems, numerical algorithms for nonsmooth convex-concave minimax problems are very rare. This paper aims to develop an efficient numerical algorithm for a structured nonsmooth convex-concave minimax problem. A majorized semi-proximal alternating coordinate method (mspACM) is proposed, in which a majorized quadratic convex-concave function is adopted for approximating the smooth part of the objective function and semi-proximal terms are added in each subproblem. This construction enables the subproblems at each iteration are solvable and even easily solved when the semiproximal terms are cleverly chosen. We prove the global convergence of the algorithm mspACM under mild assumptions, without requiring strong convexity-concavity condition. Under the locally metrical subregularity of the solution mapping, we prove that the algorithm mspACM has the linear rate of convergence. Preliminary numerical results are reported to verify the efficiency of the algorithm mspACM.
We provide improved convergence rates for constrained convex-concave min-max problems and monotone variational inequalities with higher-order smoothness. In min-max settings where the $p^{th}$-order derivatives are Lipschitz continuous, we give an algorithm HigherOrderMirrorProx that achieves an iteration complexity of $O(1/T^{frac{p+1}{2}})$ when given access to an oracle for finding a fixed point of a $p^{th}$-order equation. We give analogous rates for the weak monotone variational inequality problem. For $p>2$, our results improve upon the iteration complexity of the first-order Mirror Prox method of Nemirovski [2004] and the second-order method of Monteiro and Svaiter [2012]. We further instantiate our entire algorithm in the unconstrained $p=2$ case.