Related papers: A Continuous Nonlinear Optimization Perspective on…
Convex relaxation methods are powerful tools for studying the lowest energy of many-body problems. By relaxing the representability conditions for marginals to a set of local constraints, along with a global semidefinite constraint, a…
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…
Correspondence problems are often modelled as quadratic optimization problems over permutations. Common scalable methods for approximating solutions of these NP-hard problems are the spectral relaxation for non-convex energies and the…
Many nonlinear optimal control and optimization problems involve constraints that combine continuous dynamics with discrete logic conditions. Standard approaches typically rely on mixed-integer programming, which introduces scalability…
Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is one of the simplest and most popular stochastic optimization methods. While it has already been theoretically studied for decades, the classical analysis usually required non-trivial smoothness…
Nonlinear convex problems arise in various areas of applied mathematics and engineering. Classical techniques such as the relaxed proximal point algorithm (PPA) and the prediction correction (PC) method were proposed for linearly…
This paper presents an algorithm to solve non-convex optimal control problems, where non-convexity can arise from nonlinear dynamics, and non-convex state and control constraints. This paper assumes that the state and control constraints…
We introduce a new class of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for sparse box-constrained quadratic programs, obtained by a novel integration of the Reformulation Linearization Technique into standard SDP relaxations while…
In this paper we develop a Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dynamics (SGLD) algorithm tailored for solving a certain class of non-convex distributionally robust optimisation (DRO) problems. By deriving non-asymptotic convergence bounds, we…
This paper is concerned with solving nonconvex learning problems with folded concave penalty. Despite that their global solutions entail desirable statistical properties, they lack optimization techniques that guarantee global optimality in…
We give a quantum speedup for solving the canonical semidefinite programming relaxation for binary quadratic optimization. This class of relaxations for combinatorial optimization has so far eluded quantum speedups. Our methods combine…
In this paper we study a broad class of structured nonlinear programming (SNLP) problems. In particular, we first establish the first-order optimality conditions for them. Then we propose sequential convex programming (SCP) methods for…
We study the classical coalition structure generation (CSG) problem and compare the anytime behavior of three algorithmic paradigms: dynamic programming (DP), MILP branch-and-bound, and sparse relaxations based on greedy or $l_1$-type…
We study the maximization of sums of heterogeneous quadratic forms over the Stiefel manifold, a nonconvex problem that arises in several modern signal processing and machine learning applications such as heteroscedastic probabilistic…
A polynomial optimization problem (POP) consists of minimizing a multivariate real polynomial on a semi-algebraic set $K$ described by polynomial inequalities and equations. In its full generality it is a non-convex, multi-extremal,…
Many nonconvex problems in robotics can be relaxed into convex formulations via Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) that can be solved to global optimality. The practical quality of these solutions, however, critically depends on rounding them…
Consider a finite system of non-strict polynomial inequalities with solution set $S\subseteq\mathbb R^n$. Its Lasserre relaxation of degree $d$ is a certain natural linear matrix inequality in the original variables and one additional…
Model instability and poor prediction of long-term behavior are common problems when modeling dynamical systems using nonlinear "black-box" techniques. Direct optimization of the long-term predictions, often called simulation error…
Given an affine space of matrices $\mathcal{L}$ and a matrix $\Theta\in \mathcal{L}$, consider the problem of computing the closest rank deficient matrix to $\Theta$ on $\mathcal{L}$ with respect to the Frobenius norm. This is a nonconvex…
Topology optimization of frame structures under free-vibration eigenvalue constraints constitutes a challenging nonconvex polynomial optimization problem with disconnected feasible sets. In this article, we first formulate it as a…