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Dongdong Ge

Publications and source records attributed to Dongdong Ge.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Infeasible Momentum Orthogonalized Methods for Optimization on the Stiefel Manifold

We study deterministic and stochastic optimization over the Stiefel manifold, explicitly allowing iterates to deviate from the manifold rather than enforcing feasibility via retraction at each step. We introduce Landom, a Landing-type method that constructs momentum in the relative-gradient direction, maps this update to its compact polar factor, and combines the resulting tangential step with a step along the negative gradient of the orthogonality penalty to improve feasibility. Under operator-to-nuclear smoothness, Landom achieves an $O(T^{-1/2})$ bound on the averaged nuclear norm of the relative gradient with exact gradients, and an $O(T^{-1/4})$ bound in expectation with stochastic momentum, bounded variance, and a fixed batch size. Our analysis also provides explicit pathwise bounds on the orthogonality residual, including its dependence on the step size and initial infeasibility. To address the coupling between objective and feasibility correction in Landom, we further propose Landom+, a two-timescale variant in which the tangential and normal step sizes are decoupled. By keeping the normal step size fixed, Landom+ achieves tighter control over the orthogonality residual following an initial transient while maintaining the respective convergence rates for stationarity. Numerical experiments across a range of applications illustrate that the proposed algorithms remain competitive with established manifold optimization approaches.

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ProLand: A New Infeasible Manifold Optimization Method for LoRA Fine-Tuning

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) enables parameter-efficient fine-tuning but can suffer from redundant basis directions. Constraining the basis factor to the Stiefel manifold addresses this redundancy through orthonormality. Landing methods allow temporarily infeasible iterates to explore a neighborhood of the manifold while progressively restoring orthogonality without per-step retractions. To improve optimization efficiency while retaining this flexibility, we introduce ProLand (Product-space Landing), a retraction-free optimizer that combines coordinated factor updates with Muon-style spectral directions. By designing the updates in the space of the represented weight increment, ProLand separates objective optimization from orthogonality restoration, supporting efficient feasibility recovery. This coordinated construction also enables Muon-style directions to guide objective optimization while preserving that separation. Experiments cover four GLUE validation tasks on DeBERTa-v3-base and seven language benchmarks on Qwen2.5-3B, Llama-3.2-3B, and Moonlight-16B-A3B across multiple adapter ranks. Across these 11 tasks, ProLand achieves the highest average score among the compared methods in every tested encoder and decoder model-rank configuration.

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A Practical GPU-Enhanced Matrix-Free Primal-Dual Method for Large-Scale Conic Programs

In this paper, we introduce a practical GPU-enhanced matrix-free first-order method for solving large-scale conic programming problems, which we refer to as PDCS, standing for the Primal-Dual Conic Programming Solver. Problems that it solves include linear programs, second-order cone programs, convex quadratic programs, and exponential cone programs. The method avoids matrix factorizations and uses sparse matrix-vector multiplication as its core operation, which is memory-efficient and well suited for GPU acceleration. It builds on a variant of the primal-dual hybrid gradient method (PDHG) called reflected restarted Halpern PDHG with averaging, which we prove converges on general conic programs, and further incorporates several practical enhancements. Its GPU implementation, cuPDCS, uses customized computational schemes that assign cones of different types and sizes to different levels of the GPU architecture. Numerical experiments demonstrate that cuPDCS is generally more efficient than state-of-the-art commercial solvers and other first-order methods on large-scale conic program applications, including Fisher market equilibrium problems, Lasso regression, and multi-period portfolio optimization. cuPDCS also exhibits better scalability, efficiency, and robustness compared to other first-order methods on the conic program benchmark dataset CBLIB. These advantages are more pronounced in large-scale settings.

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TAO: Tool-Aware Joint Scheduling for LLM-Based Agentic Serving

Agentic services alternate between model inference on clustered GPUs and external tools on distributed CPUs. In this scenario, existing systems (1) overlook tool-return readiness in service evaluation, wasting limited resources, and (2) use heuristic strategies to decide admission and placement on GPUs, resulting in suboptimal scheduling decisions. To bridge this gap, we present TAO, a tool-aware joint scheduling framework for LLM-based agentic serving. Its value interface combines near-term tool readiness, node-specific cache credit with time-aware decay, and token footprint; a dynamic program jointly selects and places waiting sessions under capacity constraints. Across the 12 reported model-workload-concurrency settings, TAO reduces latency by up to 26.8%, reduces mean time to first token (TTFT) by up to 36.3%, and increases decode throughput by up to 29.5% relative to the best evaluated state-of-the-art baseline for each metric.

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MoE-SpAc: Efficient MoE Inference Based on Speculative Activation Utility in Heterogeneous Edge Scenarios

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable scalable performance but face severe memory constraints on edge devices. Existing offloading strategies struggle with I/O bottlenecks due to the dynamic, low-information nature of autoregressive expert activation. In this paper, we propose to repurpose Speculative Decoding (SD) not merely as a compute accelerator, but as an informative lookahead sensor for memory management, supported by our theoretical and empirical analyses. Hence, we introduce MoE-SpAc, an MoE inference framework that integrates a Speculative Utility Estimator to track expert demand, a Heterogeneous Workload Balancer to dynamically partition computation via online integer optimization, and an Asynchronous Execution Engine to unify the prefetching and eviction in the same utility space. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that MoE-SpAc achieves a 42% improvement in TPS over the SOTA SD-based baseline, and an average 4.04x speedup over all standard baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/lshAlgorithm/MoE-SpAc .

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Hybrid Momentum Methods for Optimizing Deep Learning Models

Momentum is central to stochastic optimization in deep learning, including the training of large language models. Classical momentum methods typically rely on a fast exponential moving average (EMA) scheme, which discounts past gradients on a fixed timescale and may underweight older gradients that remain informative. This creates a trade-off between retaining long-term history and adapting to recent changes. We introduce Hybrid Momentum (HyM), which combines a linearly weighted average of past gradients with a geometrically discounted fast momentum. The former assigns weights proportional to the gradients' iteration indices and retains a growing span of history, while the latter emphasizes recent gradients. This hybrid construction is modular and can be combined with adaptive preconditioning and other update transformations. In particular, we propose HyMUON, which applies Newton--Schulz orthogonalization to the hybrid direction. Illustrative examples and controlled experiments demonstrate the benefits of combining gradient information across these two timescales. Across image classification, machine translation, and language modeling, HyM and HyMUON match or improve upon strong baselines. HyMUON improves over Muon on IWSLT14, and in both the 100k- and 600k-step GPT-2 124M OpenWebText regimes. For LLaMA-1.3B pretraining on C4, HyMUON achieves a final validation loss of 2.777, compared with 2.903 for Muon.

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ORSMT: Unleashing the Potential of Satisfiability Modulo Theories for Semantic Verification and Repair in LLM-Based Optimization

Large language models increasingly automate optimization modeling from natural language problems, producing written mathematics, solver code and a returned report. Verifying one optimization problem across these artifacts requires semantic comparison: unequal models can attain the same objective, equivalent models can use different auxiliary variables, and mutually consistent artifacts can omit the same source requirement. ORSMT provides a typed semantic interface and exact SMT relation queries. It aligns observable decisions, projects auxiliary variables, proves or refutes feasible region and objective relations, localizes refutations to implicated rows or domains and links source texts when available. It then reconstructs one artifact from another, and each adopted candidate passes the required relation checks. Across 3,034 problems and six generator sizes, ORSMT improves the model-code match rate in all 72 benchmark and generator combinations before selection. Protected selection raises the aggregate rate from 43.2% to 88.2% and the share that are both correct and matched from 25.2% to 40.2%. On the 1,905 refuted outputs, certified voting under the shared fallback makes 50.9% of outputs correct and matched, compared with 44.8% for ReLoop and 49.4% for Opt-Verifier. A separate one-round source revision followed by exact reconstruction restores a model-code match for 84.4% of the refuted pairs.

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LLMs as Adaptive Meta-Solvers: Strategy-Diverse RL for Industrial-Scale Optimization

Scaling LLM-based optimization from textbook-scale instances to real-world, industrial tasks remains a critical open challenge. Existing approaches are predominantly evaluated on small, self-contained textual problems and often commit to a solver-integrated paradigm, limiting their ability to handle the scale and structural diversity of practical optimization workloads. In this work, we propose a practical framework for training open-source LLMs to tackle real-world, industrial-scale optimization. We first show empirically that solver-integrated reasoning, exact combinatorial algorithm, and heuristic search exhibit complementary strengths across different problem structures and scales. Motivated by this, we introduce Strategy-Diverse Reinforcement Learning (SDRL), which trains LLMs as adaptive optimization meta-solvers. SDRL leverages this complementarity through a correctness-gated hierarchical diversity reward that promotes robust exploration across varying strategies and within each strategy, effectively preventing premature strategy collapse. We further introduce a mixed-format training scheme that jointly supports both self-contained textual problems and file-grounded instances. Across comprehensive evaluations, our framework outperforms existing fine-tuned methods and frontier models including DeepSeek-V4-Pro and GPT-5.5, both on average across benchmarks and on industrial-scale optimization tasks.

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A Curved-Path Refinement of the Kalai--Kleitman Diameter Bound

Let $Δ_u(d,n)$ be the maximum graph diameter of a pointed $d$-dimensional polyhedron with $n$ facets. Using a curved-path encoding of the iterated Kalai--Kleitman recurrence, we prove, uniformly over $n\geq d\geq 4$, \[ Δ_u(d,n) \leq (n-d)^{\log_2 G_d},\qquad G_d = (4\ln 2+o(1))\frac{d}{(\ln d)^2}, \] where the asymptotic expression for $G_d$ is understood as $d\to\infty$, improving the exponent of the previous best quasi-polynomial bound by an additional logarithmic factor. With the quantitative $d$-step reduction, we also obtain the complementary excess-based bound \[ Δ_u(d,n) \leq (n-d)^{\frac{1}{2}\log_2(n-d)+O(1)}, \] where the implied constant is absolute. In the regime $n - d = Θ(d)$, the latter bound is asymptotically stronger and halves the leading coefficient in the exponent. We further examine their behavior as $n$ grows relative to $d$, obtaining sharper exponents when $n = d^{1/γ+o(1)}$ for fixed $0<γ<1$ and an almost-linear bound in the deep-tail regime $(\ln n)/d\to\infty$. We also show that the leading term of the general bound is sharp within this positive path-counting framework.

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Beyond Verified Answers: Solver-Informed Self-Distillation for Bootstrapping Operations Research Language Models

Modern large language models (LLMs) can translate natural-language descriptions into operations research (OR) formulations. Post-training techniques including reinforcement learning and on-policy self-distillation have further improved this capability. However, three limitations remain in training LLMs for OR formulations. First, training commonly relies on synthetic formulations validated by human experts or stronger models, constraining scalable supervision. Second, credit assignment is either coarse or costly: outcome rewards score an entire trajectory without locating the responsible modeling decision, whereas process-level supervision requires an additional evaluator. Third, privileged self-distillation can induce style mismatch by using solver context unavailable at deployment. We find that a model can improve from solver-artifact feedback generated by its own rollouts, making self-distillation a practical, evaluator-free source of dense supervision. Therefore, we propose SOLID: Solver-Informed On-Policy LearnIng through Self-Distillation, a novel framework for self-improving OR language models without verified answers or external evaluators. SOLID executes candidate programs from multiple rollouts, clusters their objectives, and selects a majority-group artifact as a pseudo-reference. The model then performs updates using group-relative advantages and dense self-supervision signals. Across multiple OR benchmarks, SOLID improves solution accuracy for both general-purpose and OR-tuned models over outcome-only group-relative training. These results show that solver artifacts can support scalable self-improvement without trusted answers.

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Ask Before You Optimize: Dynamic Pre-Formulation Clarification for Interactive Optimization

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to formulate optimization models from natural-language problem descriptions, yet realistic operations research (OR) requests are often incomplete: missing objectives, constraints, or business rules can change the resulting mathematical program. Existing evaluations largely assume a complete specification and therefore overlook whether an agent knows when clarification is needed before modeling. We introduce OR-Clarify, a benchmark for pre-formulation clarification. Each task presents a partial public problem description, withholds structured hidden slots, and evaluates agents through bounded interaction with a simulated user. The benchmark supports both openended and choice-based clarification, and measures slot recovery, stopping behavior, silent assumptions, and interaction cost. We further propose Interactive Optimization (InterOPT), a two-stage framework that identifies unresolved formulation-critical gaps and uses them to guide whether to ask the next question or to stop. In our choice-based experiments, InterOPT substantially outperforms all baselines in exact slot recovery; in the open-ended setting, it remains competitive with strong prior methods. Together, OR-Clarify and InterOPT reframe OR assistance as a selective completeness decision: clarify when needed, stop when ready, and quantify what remains missing.

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DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each document contributing supporting facts, bridge entities, query refinements, or sufficient evidence for answering. Evidence acquisition can involve iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence assessment, and sufficiency checking. We introduce DynaKRAG, a unified evidence-action framework that learns a shared state-conditioned policy for coordinating these operations. At each step, a deterministic validity layer constructs the executable action set, a learned continuation gate selects between answer generation and further evidence acquisition, and a learned advantage scorer ranks feasible evidence operations by their predicted gain relative to immediate answer generation. The selected operation updates the shared state and may enable additional operations. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with Qwen2.5-7B, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.1-8B, DynaKRAG ranks first among the compared methods in both EM and F1 for all nine dataset--backbone pairs. Relative to matched-backbone baseline method, DynaKRAG improves F1 in every pair while achieving total-token efficiency gains of 10.1--34.3\% and retrieval-call efficiency gains of 15.1--43.4\%, establishing Pareto dominance under these measures. With Qwen2.5-7B, terminal evidence compression further improves answer quality across all three datasets while reducing the context passed to final answer generation by 54.4\%--71.5\%. These results demonstrate that unified, state-conditioned evidence control supports strong answer quality, efficient retrieval, and compact answer-generation contexts.

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Skill2Query: Exploiting Skill Structure to Generate Pseudo-Queries for Agent Skill Retrieval

Pseudo-query generation can alleviate the supervision bottleneck for agent skill retrieval, but existing document-level approaches typically leave the rich internal relations among capabilities, parameters, and usage examples implicit. As a result, generated queries may be topically relevant to a skill while lacking capability grounding and parameter consistency, raising the question of whether explicitly exploiting a skill document's internal structure can produce more effective retrieval signals. We therefore propose Skill2Query, a framework that first parses a skill document into a Skill Knowledge Graph and then generates pseudo-queries through a three-stage process including style mimicking, query template generation, and parameter filling. The generated queries can be used for offline index augmentation, online query expansion, and retriever training. Four benchmarks (TheoremQA, LogicBench, ToolQA, and CHAMP) are used to evaluate Skill2Query with large-scale skill candidate pools across multiple downstream applications, including skill retrieval, retriever training, and end-to-end agent execution. Using nearly 30K skills across diverse domains, we generate 700K category-diverse pseudo-queries. Skill2Query consistently improves sparse, dense, and skill-routing retrieval, with an average Recall@1 gain of 6.70 percentage points across retrieval settings. Skill2Query-generated training data also achieves the best Recall@1 and nDCG@1 among the evaluated generation baselines. Further evaluations with multiple LLM backends demonstrate that improved skill retrieval translates into higher agent task success rates. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/MatZaharia/Skill2Query.

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GPU-Accelerated Conic Quadratic Programming with Local Linear Convergence under Strict Complementarity

We present PDHCG-CQP, a GPU-accelerated first-order solver for large-scale conic convex quadratic programming. PDHCG-CQP supports affine constraints and Cartesian products of nonnegative, second-order, rotated second-order, exponential, and three-dimensional power cones. At its core is a restarted averaged primal-dual hybrid gradient (PDHG) method, whose primal update is computed inexactly by solving a conic quadratic proximal subproblem with projected gradient iterations. We establish local linear convergence of the restarted averaged scheme with both exact and inexact primal proximal evaluations under a uniform local quadratic-growth condition on the smoothed primal-dual gap. We further show that this condition holds under strict complementarity by exploiting a rotated second-order-cone lifting together with local primal and dual regularity conditions. Our C/CUDA implementation combines matrix-free linear algebra, batched cone projections, adaptive inner solves, reflected-Halpern acceleration, and fully device-resident KKT residual computations. It also supports multi-GPU execution through a two-dimensional partitioning of the problem data. Extensive experiments on standard and large-scale quadratic programming (QP), convex quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP), second-order cone programming (SOCP), and quasilinear Fisher equilibrium benchmarks demonstrate that PDHCG-CQP achieves state-of-the-art robustness among first-order solvers while scaling efficiently to 8 GPUs and instances with up to $4.4\times10^8$ stored primal coordinates. PDHCG-CQP is open source and available at https://github.com/Lhongpei/PDHCG.

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A Curvature-Aware Rank-Adaptive Distributed Augmented-Lagrangian Solver for Large-Scale SDPs

We present CARDAL (Curvature-Aware Rank-Adaptive Distributed Augmented Lagrangian), a distributed multi-GPU solver for large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) based on a rank-adaptive Burer-Monteiro factorization and an augmented Lagrangian method. At fixed ranks, a matrix-free L-BFGS method with negative-curvature corrections targets an approximate Euclidean second-order stationary point of the factored augmented Lagrangian. A reverse multiplier shift turns a negative dual-slack direction into exact negative curvature after rank expansion, and a small joint rank-lift problem selects a batched low-rank correction. A verified slack lower bound provides an a posteriori approximate KKT certificate. Our analysis establishes generic global-optimality guarantees for heterogeneous products of PSD cones at per-block ranks near the Barvinok-Pataki scale, together with a finite-accuracy counterpart under blockwise cost smoothing. For scalable execution, CARDAL distributes constraint rows, factor columns, and PSD blocks over a Constraint x Rank x Cone device mesh. The primal residual, gradient, Hessian-vector products, and slack matrix-vector products are evaluated using device-local operations and axis-wise collectives. On the Mittelmann benchmark, CARDAL exhibits stronger robustness than existing low-rank GPU approaches under a uniform accuracy standard. Experiments on large-scale SDP relaxations from robotics, electronic structure, and Max-Cut demonstrate the complementary scaling regimes of the three distribution axes, with observed wall-clock speedups of up to 4x on four H100 GPUs.

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GraphBU: MILP Instance Generation with Graph-Native Block Units

Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) instances used for solver development are hard to obtain when models come from private or application-specific pipelines. A generator must keep the structure that solvers and learned policies rely on. Existing general generators usually choose their generation unit from a formulation template, summary statistics, local graph edits, or blocks found after recombination. These units do not explicitly record how a local part of the MILP is coupled to the rest of the instance. We propose GraphBU, a graph-native generator whose basic unit is a local subproblem plus its interface. The method promotes coupling nodes into master constraints or boundary variables and uses the resulting block units for compatibility-checked replacement. The analysis focuses on the properties needed by this construction: promotion separates interfaces, replacement can preserve feasibility under an interface-slack condition, and the graph construction is invariant to row-column permutations. On MILP instances generation, this unit keeps graph statistics close to the source family, preserves feasibility on most datasets, and improves downstream Predict-and-Search training. Genrated by GraphBU, The average graph-statistical similarity was approximately 0.934, the average feasibility was approximately 96.7%, and the average increase in the main index of downstream PS was approximately 8.0%.

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Homogeneous second-order descent framework: a fast alternative to Newton-type methods

This paper proposes a homogeneous second-order descent framework (HSODF) for nonconvex and convex optimization based on the generalized homogeneous model (GHM). In comparison to the Newton steps, the GHM can be solved by extremal symmetric eigenvalue procedures and thus grant an advantage in ill-conditioned problems. Moreover, GHM extends the ordinary homogeneous model (OHM) (Zhang et al. 2022) to allow adaptiveness in the construction of the aggregated matrix. Consequently, HSODF is able to recover some well-known second-order methods, such as trust-region methods and gradient regularized methods, while maintaining comparable iteration complexity bounds. We also study two specific realizations of HSODF. One is adaptive HSODM, which has a parameter-free $O(ε^{-3/2})$ global complexity bound for nonconvex second-order Lipschitz continuous objective functions. The other one is homotopy HSODM, which is proven to have a global linear rate of convergence without strong convexity. The efficiency of our approach to ill-conditioned and high-dimensional problems is justified by some preliminary numerical results.

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A homogeneous second-order descent method for nonconvex optimization

In this paper, we introduce a Homogeneous Second-Order Descent Method (HSODM) using the homogenized quadratic approximation to the original function. The merit of homogenization is that only the leftmost eigenvector of a gradient-Hessian integrated matrix is computed at each iteration. Therefore, the algorithm is a single-loop method that does not need to switch to other sophisticated algorithms and is easy to implement. We show that HSODM has a global convergence rate of $O(ε^{-3/2})$ to find an $ε$-approximate second-order stationary point, and has a local quadratic convergence rate under the standard assumptions. The numerical results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method over other second-order methods.

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