arXiv subjects

Bruno F. Lourenço

Publications and source records attributed to Bruno F. Lourenço.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Self-dual polyhedral cones and their slack matrices

We analyze self-dual polyhedral cones and prove several properties about their slack matrices. In particular, we show that self-duality is equivalent to the existence of a positive semidefinite (PSD) slack. Beyond that, we show that if the underlying cone is irreducible, then the corresponding PSD slacks are not only doubly nonnegative matrices (DNN) but are extreme rays of the cone of DNN matrices, which correspond to a family of extreme rays not previously described. More surprisingly, we show that, unless the cone is simplicial, PSD slacks not only fail to be completely positive matrices but they also lie outside the cone of completely positive semidefinite matrices. Finally, we show how one can use semidefinite programming to probe the existence of self-dual cones with given combinatorics. Our results are given for polyhedral cones but we also discuss some consequences for negatively self-polar polytopes.

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arXiv2023

Automorphisms of rank-one generated hyperbolicity cones and their derivative relaxations

A hyperbolicity cone is said to be rank-one generated (ROG) if all its extreme rays have rank one, where the rank is computed with respect to the underlying hyperbolic polynomial. This is a natural class of hyperbolicity cones which are strictly more general than the ROG spectrahedral cones. In this work, we present a study of the automorphisms of ROG hyperbolicity cones and their derivative relaxations. One of our main results states that the automorphisms of the derivative relaxations are exactly the automorphisms of the original cone fixing a certain direction. As an application, we completely determine the automorphisms of the derivative relaxations of the nonnegative orthant and of the cone of positive semidefinite matrices. More generally, we also prove relations between the automorphisms of a spectral cone and the underlying permutation-invariant set, which might be of independent interest.

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arXiv2023

Random projection of Linear and Semidefinite problem with linear inequalities

The Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma states that there exist linear maps that project a set of points of a vector space into a space of much lower dimension such that the Euclidean distance between these points is approximately preserved. This lemma has been previously used to prove that we can randomly aggregate, using a random matrix whose entries are drawn from a zero-mean sub-Gaussian distribution, the equality constraints of an Linear Program (LP) while preserving approximately the value of the problem. In this paper we extend these results to the inequality case by introducing a random matrix with non-negative entries that allows to randomly aggregate inequality constraints of an LP while preserving approximately the value of the problem. By duality, the approach we propose allows to reduce both the number of constraints and the dimension of the problem while obtaining some theoretical guarantees on the optimal value. We will also show an extension of our results to certain semidefinite programming instances.

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arXiv2022

A Simplified Treatment of Ramana's Exact Dual for Semidefinite Programming

In semidefinite programming the dual may fail to attain its optimal value and there could be a duality gap, i.e., the primal and dual optimal values may differ. In a striking paper, Ramana proposed a polynomial size extended dual that does not have these deficiencies and yields a number of fundamental results in complexity theory. In this work we walk the reader through a concise and self-contained derivation of Ramana's dual, relying mostly on elementary linear algebra.

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arXiv2022

Convergence analysis under consistent error bounds

We introduce the notion of consistent error bound functions which provides a unifying framework for error bounds for multiple convex sets. This framework goes beyond the classical Lipschitzian and Hölderian error bounds and includes logarithmic and entropic error bounds found in the exponential cone. It also includes the error bounds obtainable under the theory of amenable cones. Our main result is that the convergence rate of several projection algorithms for feasibility problems can be expressed explicitly in terms of the underlying consistent error bound function. Another feature is the usage of Karamata theory and functions of regular variations which allows us to reason about convergence rates while bypassing certain complicated expressions. Finally, applications to conic feasibility problems are given and we show that a number of algorithms have convergence rates depending explicitly on the singularity degree of the problem.

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arXiv2022

Amenable cones are particularly nice

Amenability is a geometric property of convex cones that is stronger than facial exposedness and assists in the study of error bounds for conic feasibility problems. In this paper we establish numerous properties of amenable cones, and investigate the relationships between amenability and other properties of convex cones, such as niceness and projectional exposure. We show that the amenability of a compact slice of a closed convex cone is equivalent to the amenability of the cone, and prove several results on the preservation of amenability under intersections and other convex operations. It then follows that homogeneous, doubly nonnegative and other cones that can be represented as slices of the cone of positive semidefinite matrices, are amenable. It is known that projectionally exposed cones are amenable and that amenable cones are nice, however the converse statements have been open questions. We construct an example of a four-dimensional cone that is nice but not amenable. We also show that amenable cones are projectionally exposed in dimensions up to and including four. We conclude with a discussion on open problems related to facial structure of convex sets that we came across in the course of this work, but were not able to fully resolve.

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arXiv2022

Error bounds, facial residual functions and applications to the exponential cone

We construct a general framework for deriving error bounds for conic feasibility problems. In particular, our approach allows one to work with cones that fail to be amenable or even to have computable projections, two previously challenging barriers. For the purpose, we first show how error bounds may be constructed using objects called one-step facial residual functions. Then, we develop several tools to compute these facial residual functions even in the absence of closed form expressions for the projections onto the cones. We demonstrate the use and power of our results by computing tight error bounds for the exponential cone feasibility problem. Interestingly, we discover a natural example for which the tightest error bound is related to the Boltzmann-Shannon entropy. We were also able to produce an example of sets for which a Hölderian error bound holds but the supremum of the set of admissible exponents is not itself an admissible exponent.

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arXiv2020

Solving SDP Completely with an Interior Point Oracle

We suppose the existence of an oracle which solves any semidefinite programming (SDP) problem satisfying Slater's condition simultaneously at its primal and dual sides. We note that such an oracle might not be able to directly solve general SDPs even after certain regularization schemes are applied. In this work we fill this gap and show how to use such an oracle to "completely solve" an arbitrary SDP. Completely solving an SDP, includes, for example, distinguishing between weak/strong feasibility/infeasibility and detecting when the optimal value is attained or not. We will employ several tools, including a variant of facial reduction where all auxiliary problems are ensured to satisfy Slater's condition at all sides. Our main technical innovation, however, is an analysis of double facial reduction, which is the process of applying facial reduction twice: first to the original problem and then once more to the dual of the regularized problem obtained during the first run. Although our discussion is focused on semidefinite programming, the majority of the results are proved for general convex cones

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arXiv2020

Generalized subdifferentials of spectral functions over Euclidean Jordan algebras

This paper is devoted to the study of generalized subdifferentials of spectral functions over Euclidean Jordan algebras. Spectral functions appear often in optimization problems playing the role of "regularizer", "barrier", "penalty function" and many others. We provide formulae for the regular, approximate and horizon subdifferentials of spectral functions. In addition, under local lower semicontinuity, we also furnish a formula for the Clarke subdifferential, thus extending an earlier result by Baes. As application, we compute the generalized subdifferentials of the function that maps an element to its k-th largest eigenvalue. Furthermore, in connection with recent approaches for nonsmooth optimization, we present a study of the Kurdyka-Lojasiewicz (KL) property for spectral functions and prove a transfer principle for the KL-exponent. In our proofs, we make extensive use of recent tools such as the commutation principle of Ramírez, Seeger and Sossa and majorization principles developed by Gowda.

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arXiv2019

Amenable cones: error bounds without constraint qualifications

We provide a framework for obtaining error bounds for linear conic problems without assuming constraint qualifications or regularity conditions. The key aspects of our approach are the notions of amenable cones and facial residual functions. For amenable cones, it is shown that error bounds can be expressed as a composition of facial residual functions. The number of compositions is related to the facial reduction technique and the singularity degree of the problem. In particular, we show that symmetric cones are amenable and compute facial residual functions. From that, we are able to furnish a new Hölderian error bound, thus extending and shedding new light on an earlier result by Sturm on semidefinite matrices. We also provide error bounds for the intersection of amenable cones, this will be used to provided error bounds for the doubly nonnegative cone.

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arXiv2018

An oracle-based projection and rescaling algorithm for linear semi-infinite feasibility problems and its application to SDP and SOCP

We point out that Chubanov's oracle-based algorithm for linear programming [5] can be applied almost as it is to linear semi-infinite programming (LSIP). In this note, we describe the details and prove the polynomial complexity of the algorithm based on the real computation model proposed by Blum, Shub and Smale (the BSS model) which is more suitable for floating point computation in modern computers. The adoption of the BBS model makes our description and analysis much simpler than the original one by Chubanov [5]. Then we reformulate semidefinite programming (SDP) and second-order cone programming (SOCP) into LSIP, and apply our algorithm to obtain new complexity results for computing interior feasible solutions of homogeneous SDP and SOCP.

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arXiv2018

The automorphism group and the non-self-duality of $p$-cones

In this paper, we determine the automorphism group of the $p$-cones ($p\neq 2$) in dimension greater than two. In particular, we show that the automorphism group of those $p$-cones are the positive scalar multiples of the generalized permutation matrices that fix the main axis of the cone. Next, we take a look at a problem related to the duality theory of the $p$-cones. Under the Euclidean inner product it is well-known that a $p$-cone is self-dual only when $p=2$. However, it was not known whether it is possible to construct an inner product depending on $p$ which makes the $p$-cone self-dual. Our results shows that no matter which inner product is considered, a $p$-cone will never become self-dual unless $p=2$ or the dimension is less than three.

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arXiv2018

Exact augmented Lagrangian functions for nonlinear semidefinite programming

In this paper, we study augmented Lagrangian functions for nonlinear semidefinite programming (NSDP) problems with exactness properties. The term exact is used in the sense that the penalty parameter can be taken appropriately, so a single minimization of the augmented Lagrangian recovers a solution of the original problem. This leads to reformulations of NSDP problems into unconstrained nonlinear programming ones. Here, we first establish a unified framework for constructing these exact functions, generalizing Di Pillo and Lucidi's work from 1996, that was aimed at solving nonlinear programming problems. Then, through our framework, we propose a practical augmented Lagrangian function for NSDP, proving that it is continuously differentiable and exact under the so-called nondegeneracy condition. We also present some preliminary numerical experiments.

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arXiv2018

Facial Reduction and Partial Polyhedrality

We present FRA-Poly, a facial reduction algorithm (FRA) for conic linear programs that is sensitive to the presence of polyhedral faces in the cone. The main goals of FRA and FRA-Poly are the same, i.e., finding the minimal face containing the feasible region and detecting infeasibility, but FRA-Poly treats polyhedral constraints separately. This idea enables us to reduce the number of iterations drastically when there are many linear inequality constraints. The worst case number of iterations for FRA-poly is written in the terms of a "distance to polyhedrality" quantity and provides better bounds than FRA under mild conditions. In particular, in the case of the doubly nonnegative cone, FRA-Poly gives a worst case bound of $n$ whereas the classical FRA is $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$. Of possible independent interest, we prove a variant of Gordan-Stiemke's Theorem and a proper separation theorem that takes into account partial polyhedrality. We provide a discussion on the optimal facial reduction strategy and an instance that forces FRAs to perform many steps. We also present a few applications. In particular, we will use FRA-poly to improve the bounds recently obtained by Liu and Pataki on the dimension of certain affine subspaces which appear in weakly infeasible problems.

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arXiv2017

An extension of Chubanov's algorithm to symmetric cones

In this work we present an extension of Chubanov's algorithm to the case of homogeneous feasibility problems over a symmetric cone K. As in Chubanov's method for linear feasibility problems, the algorithm consists of a basic procedure and a step where the solutions are confined to the intersection of a half-space and K. Following an earlier work by Kitahara and Tsuchiya on second order cone feasibility problems, progress is measured through the volumes of those intersections: when they become sufficiently small, we know it is time to stop. We never have to explicitly compute the volumes, it is only necessary to keep track of the reductions between iterations. We show this is enough to obtain concrete upper bounds to the minimum eigenvalues of a scaled version of the original feasibility problem. Another distinguishing feature of our approach is the usage of a spectral norm that takes into account the way that K is decomposed as simple cones. In several key cases, including semidefinite programming and second order cone programming, these norms make it possible to obtain better complexity bounds for the basic procedure when compared to a recent approach by Peña and Soheili. Finally, in the appendix, we present a translation of the algorithm to the homogeneous feasibility problem in semidefinite programming.

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arXiv2017

The $p$-cones in dimension $n \geq 3$ are not homogeneous when $p\neq 2$

Using the T-algebra machinery we show that, up to linear isomorphism, the only strictly convex homogeneous cones in $\Re^n$ with $n \geq 3$ are the 2-cones, also known as Lorentz cones or second order cones. In particular, this shows that the p-cones are not homogeneous when $p\neq 2$, $1 < p <\infty$ and $n\geq 3$, thus answering a problem proposed by Gowda and Trott.

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arXiv2016

A bound on the Carathéodory number

The Carathéodory number k(K) of a pointed closed convex cone K is the minimum among all the k for which every element of K can be written as a nonnegative linear combination of at most k elements belonging to extreme rays. Carathéodory's Theorem gives the bound k(K) <= dim (K). In this work we observe that this bound can be sharpened to k(K) <= l-1, where l is the length of the longest chain of nonempty faces contained in K, thus tying the Carathéodory number with a key quantity that appears in the analysis of facial reduction algorithms. We show that this bound is tight for several families of cones, which include symmetric cones and the so-called smooth cones. We also give a family of examples showing that this bound can also fail to be sharp. In addition, we furnish a new proof of a result by Güler and Tunçel which states that the Carathéodory number of a symmetric cone is equal to its rank. Finally, we connect our discussion to the notion of cp-rank for completely positive matrices.

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arXiv2015

Optimality Conditions for Nonlinear Semidefinite Programming via Squared Slack Variables

In this work, we derive second-order optimality conditions for nonlinear semidefinite programming (NSDP) problems, by reformulating it as an ordinary nonlinear programming problem using squared slack variables. We first consider the correspondence between Karush-Kuhn-Tucker points and regularity conditions for the general NSDP and its reformulation via slack variables. Then, we obtain a pair of "no-gap" second-order optimality conditions that are essentially equivalent to the ones already considered in the literature. We conclude with the analysis of some computational prospects of the squared slack variables approach for NSDP.

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