Related papers: Square distance functions are Polyak-{\L}ojasiewic…
If $X$ is a convex surface in a Euclidean space, then the squared intrinsic distance function $\dist^2(x,y)$ is DC (d.c., delta-convex) on $X\times X$ in the only natural extrinsic sense. An analogous result holds for the squared distance…
The Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) inequality extends the favorable optimization properties of strongly convex functions to a broader class of functions. In this paper, we prove a theorem (also obtained by Criscitiello, Rebjock and Boumal in…
We investigate several possibilities of obtaining a {\L}ojasiewicz inequality for definable multifunctions and give some examples of applications thereof. In particular, we prove that the Hausdorff distance and its extension to closed sets…
The class of convex sets that admit approximations as Minkowski sum of a compact convex set and a closed convex cone in the Hausdorff distance is introduced. These sets are called approximately Motzkin-decomposable and generalize the notion…
The piecewise-concave function may be used to approximate a wide range of other functions to arbitrary precision over a bounded set. In this short paper, this property is proven for three function classes: (a) the multivariate twice…
Introduced by Polyak in 1966, the class of strongly quasiconvex functions includes some interesting nonconvex members, like the square root of the Euclidean norm or ratios with a nonnegative strongly convex numerator and a concave and…
Several optimization schemes have been known for convex optimization problems. However, numerical algorithms for solving nonconvex optimization problems are still underdeveloped. A progress to go beyond convexity was made by considering the…
We address the minimization of the sum of a proper, convex and lower semicontinuous with a (possibly nonconvex) smooth function from the perspective of an implicit dynamical system of forward-backward type. The latter is formulated by means…
We propose a forward-backward proximal-type algorithm with inertial/memory effects for minimizing the sum of a nonsmooth function with a smooth one in the nonconvex setting. The sequence of iterates generated by the algorithm converges to a…
This paper studies the strong quasiconvexity of norm and distance functions in finite-dimensional normed spaces. Although the Euclidean norm is known to be strongly quasiconvex on bounded convex sets, a complete characterization of this…
An equidistant set in the Euclidean space consists of points having equal distances to both members of a given pair of sets, called focal sets. Having no effective formulas to compute the distance of a point and a set, it is hard to…
We study the Riemannian distance function from a fixed point (a point-wise target) of Euclidean space in the presence of a compact obstacle bounded by a smooth hypersurface. First, we show that such a function is locally semiconcave with a…
The Polyak-{\L}ojasiewicz (P{\L}) condition is often invoked in nonconvex optimization because it allows fast convergence of algorithms beyond strong convexity. A function $f \colon \mathcal{M} \to \mathbb{R}$ on a Riemannian manifold…
We extend to infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces a celebrated result, due to B. Polyak, about the convexity of the joint image of quadratic functions. We give sufficient conditions which assure that the joint image is also closed. However,…
On a complete, connected, locally compact, non-compact geodesic space $(X,d)$, we assign each compact set a distance-like function. With the help of these functions, we obtain a pseudo-metric on the space of (non-empty) compact subsets of…
We study the regularity of the distance function to the boundary of a domain in $\mathbb{R}^n$, with respect to the Minkowski functional of a convex polytope. We obtain the regularity of the distance function in certain cases. We also…
In this paper we present an abstract convergence analysis of inexact descent methods in Riemannian context for functions satisfying Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz inequality. In particular, without any restrictive assumption about the sign of the…
Kurdyka-{\L}ojasiewicz (K{\L}) functions are real-valued functions characterized by a differential inequality involving the norm of their gradient. This class of functions is quite rich, containing objects as diverse as subanalytic,…
We construct a family of closeness functions on the space of finite volume Lorentzian geometries using the abundance of discrete intervals in the underlying random causal sets. Although strictly weaker than a Lorentzian Gromov-Hausdorff…
Given an Euclidean space, this paper elucidates the topological link between the partial derivatives of the Minkowski functional associated to a set (assumed to be compact, convex, with a differentiable boundary and a non-empty interior)…