English

On the exactness of Lasserre relaxations for compact convex basic closed semialgebraic sets

Algebraic Geometry 2018-03-01 v2 Optimization and Control

Abstract

Consider a finite system of non-strict real polynomial inequalities and suppose its solution set SRnS\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 SS. Suppose that each defining polynomial satisfies a second order strict quasiconcavity condition where it vanishes on SS (which is very natural because of the convexity of SS) or its Hessian has a certain matrix sums of squares certificate for negative-semidefiniteness on SS (fulfilled trivially by linear polynomials). Then we show that the system possesses an exact Lasserre relaxation. In their seminal work of 2009, Helton and Nie showed under the same conditions that SS is the projection of a spectrahedron, i.e., it has a semidefinite representation. The semidefinite representation used by Helton and Nie arises from glueing together Lasserre relaxations of many small pieces obtained in a non-constructive way. By refining and varying their approach, we show that we can simply take a Lasserre relaxation of the original system itself. Such a result was provided by Helton and Nie with much more machinery only under very technical conditions and after changing the description of SS.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.07231,
  title  = {On the exactness of Lasserre relaxations for compact convex basic closed semialgebraic sets},
  author = {Markus Schweighofer and Tom-Lukas Kriel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07231},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

22 pages, to appear in SIAM J. Opt

R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:25:47.822Z