arXiv subjects

Yu-Hong Dai

Publications and source records attributed to Yu-Hong Dai.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Zeroth-Order Alternating Gradient Descent Ascent Algorithms for a Class of Nonconvex-Nonconcave Minimax Problems

In this paper, we consider a class of nonconvex-nonconcave minimax problems, i.e., NC-PL minimax problems, whose objective functions satisfy the Polyak-Łojasiewicz (PL) condition with respect to the inner variable. We propose a zeroth-order alternating gradient descent ascent (ZO-AGDA) algorithm and a zeroth-order variance reduced alternating gradient descent ascent (ZO-VRAGDA) algorithm for solving NC-PL minimax problem under the deterministic and the stochastic setting, respectively. The total number of function value queries to obtain an $ε$-stationary point of ZO-AGDA and ZO-VRAGDA algorithm for solving NC-PL minimax problem is upper bounded by $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$ and $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$, respectively. To the best of our knowledge, they are the first two zeroth-order algorithms with the iteration complexity gurantee for solving NC-PL minimax problems.

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arXiv2023

Efficient Quantized Constant Envelope Precoding for Multiuser Downlink Massive MIMO Systems

Quantized constant envelope (QCE) precoding, a new transmission scheme that only discrete QCE transmit signals are allowed at each antenna, has gained growing research interests due to its ability of reducing the hardware cost and the energy consumption of massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, the discrete nature of QCE transmit signals greatly complicates the precoding design. In this paper, we consider the QCE precoding problem for a massive MIMO system with phase shift keying (PSK) modulation and develop an efficient approach for solving the constructive interference (CI) based problem formulation. Our approach is based on a custom-designed (continuous) penalty model that is equivalent to the original discrete problem. Specifically, the penalty model relaxes the discrete QCE constraint and penalizes it in the objective with a negative $\ell_2$-norm term, which leads to a non-smooth non-convex optimization problem. To tackle it, we resort to our recently proposed alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. We show that the AO algorithm admits closed-form updates at each iteration when applied to our problem and thus can be efficiently implemented. Simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach over the existing algorithms.

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arXiv2023

Towards Efficient Large-Scale Network Slicing: An LP Dynamic Rounding-and-Refinement Approach

In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for the network slicing problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse service requirements. The problem has been formulated as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation in the literature. We first propose a novel linear programming (LP) relaxation of the MILP formulation. We show that compared with a natural LP relaxation of the MILP formulation, the novel LP relaxation is much more compact in terms of smaller numbers of variables and constraints, and much stronger in terms of providing a better LP bound, which makes it particularly suitable to be embedded in an LP relaxation based algorithm. Then we design an efficient two-stage LP dynamic rounding-and-refinement algorithm based on this novel LP relaxation. In the first stage, the proposed algorithm uses an LP dynamic rounding procedure to place the virtual network functions of all services into cloud nodes while taking traffic routing of all services into consideration; in the second stage, the proposed algorithm uses an iterative LP refinement procedure to obtain a solution for traffic routing of all services with their end-to-end delay constraints being satisfied. Compared with the existing algorithms which either have an exponential complexity or return a low-quality solution, our proposed algorithm achieves a better trade-off between the solution quality and the computational complexity. In particular, the worst-case complexity of our proposed algorithm is polynomial, which makes it suitable for solving large-scale problems. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

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arXiv2022

Mirror frameworks for relatively Lipschitz and monotone-like variational inequalities

Nonconvex-nonconcave saddle-point optimization in machine learning has triggered lots of research for studying non-monotone variational inequalities (VI). In this work, we introduce two mirror frameworks, called mirror extragradient method and mirror extrapolation method, for approximating solutions to relatively Lipschitz and monotone-like VIs. The former covers the well-known Nemirovski's mirror prox method and Nesterov's dual extrapolation method, and the recently proposed Bregman extragradient method; all of them can be reformulated into a scheme that is very similar to the original form of extragradient method. The latter includes the operator extrapolation method and the Bregman extrapolation method as its special cases. The proposed mirror frameworks allow us to present a unified and improved convergence analysis for all these existing methods under relative Lipschitzness and monotone-like conditions that may be the currently weakest assumptions.

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arXiv2022

A Cut-and-solve Algorithm for Virtual Machine Consolidation Problem

The virtual machine consolidation problem (VMCP) attempts to determine which servers to be activated, how to allocate virtual machines (VMs) to the activated servers, and how to migrate VMs among servers such that the summation of activated, allocation, and migration costs is minimized subject to the resource constraints of the servers and other practical constraints. In this paper, we first propose a new mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the VMCP. We show that compared with existing formulations, the proposed formulation is much more compact in terms of smaller numbers of variables or constraints, which makes it suitable for solving large-scale problems. We then develop a cut-and-solve (C&S) algorithm, a tree search algorithm to efficiently solve the VMCP to optimality. The proposed C&S algorithm is based on a novel relaxation of the VMCP that provides a stronger lower bound than the natural continuous relaxation of the VMCP, making a smaller search tree. By extensive computational experiments, we show that (i) the proposed formulation significantly outperforms existing formulations in terms of solution efficiency; and (ii) compared with standard MILP solvers, the proposed C&S algorithm is much more efficient.

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arXiv2022

A primal-dual interior-point relaxation method with global and rapidly local convergence for nonlinear programs

Based on solving an equivalent parametric equality constrained mini-max problem of the classic logarithmic-barrier subproblem, we present a novel primal-dual interior-point relaxation method for nonlinear programs with general equality and nonnegative constraints. In each iteration, our method approximately solves the KKT system of a parametric equality constrained mini-max subproblem, which avoids the requirement that any primal or dual iterate is an interior-point. The method has some similarities to the warmstarting interior-point methods in relaxing the interior-point requirement and is easily extended for solving problems with general inequality constraints. In particular, it has the potential to circumvent the jamming difficulty that appears with many interior-point methods for nonlinear programs and improve the ill conditioning of existing primal-dual interior-point methods as the barrier parameter is small. A new smoothing approach is introduced to develop our relaxation method and promote convergence of the method. Under suitable conditions, it is proved that our method can be globally convergent and locally quadratically convergent to the KKT point of the original problem. The preliminary numerical results on a well-posed problem for which many interior-point methods fail to find the minimizer and a set of test problems from the CUTEr collection show that our method is efficient.

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arXiv2022

On GSOR, the Generalized Successive Overrelaxation Method for Double Saddle-Point Problems

We consider the generalized successive overrelaxation (GSOR) method for solving a class of block three-by-three saddle-point problems. Based on the necessary and sufficient conditions for all roots of a real cubic polynomial to have modulus less than one, we derive convergence results under reasonable assumptions. We also analyze a class of block lower triangular preconditioners induced from GSOR and derive explicit and sharp spectral bounds for the preconditioned matrices. We report numerical experiments on test problems from the liquid crystal director model and the coupled Stokes-Darcy flow, demonstrating the usefulness of GSOR.

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arXiv2022

A primal-dual majorization-minimization method for large-scale linear programs

We present a primal-dual majorization-minimization method for solving large-scale linear programs. A smooth barrier augmented Lagrangian (SBAL) function with strict convexity for the dual linear program is derived. The majorization-minimization approach is naturally introduced to develop the smoothness and convexity of the SBAL function. Our method only depends on a factorization of the constant matrix independent of iterations and does not need any computation on step sizes, thus can be expected to be particularly appropriate for large-scale linear programs. The method shares some similar properties to the first-order methods for linear programs, but its convergence analysis is established on the differentiability and convexity of our SBAL function. The global convergence is analyzed without prior requiring either the primal or dual linear program to be feasible. Under the regular conditions, our method is proved to be globally linearly convergent, and a new iteration complexity result is given.

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arXiv2022

A semi-conjugate gradient method for solving unsymmetric positive definite linear systems

The conjugate gradient (CG) method is a classic Krylov subspace method for solving symmetric positive definite linear systems. We introduce an analogous semi-conjugate gradient (SCG) method for unsymmetric positive definite linear systems. Unlike CG, SCG requires the solution of a lower triangular linear system to produce each semi-conjugate direction. We prove that SCG is theoretically equivalent to the full orthogonalization method (FOM), which is based on the Arnoldi process and converges in a finite number of steps. Because SCG's triangular system increases in size each iteration, we study a sliding window implementation (SWI) to improve efficiency, and show that the directions produced are still locally semi-conjugate. A counterexample illustrates that SWI is different from the direct incomplete orthogonalization method (DIOM), which is FOM with a sliding window. Numerical experiments from the convection-diffusion equation and other applications show that SCG is robust and that the sliding window implementation SWI allows SCG to solve large systems efficiently.

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arXiv2022

Optimality Conditions and Numerical Algorithms for A Class of Linearly Constrained Minimax Optimization Problems

It is well known that there have been many numerical algorithms for solving nonsmooth minimax problems, numerical algorithms for nonsmooth minimax problems with joint linear constraints are very rare. This paper aims to discuss optimality conditions and develop practical numerical algorithms for minimax problems with joint linear constraints. First of all, we use the properties of proximal mapping and KKT system to establish optimality conditions. Secondly, we propose a framework of alternating coordinate algorithm for the minimax problem and analyze its convergence properties. Thirdly, we develop a proximal gradient multi-step ascent decent method (PGmsAD) as a numerical algorithm and demonstrate that the method can find an $ε$-stationary point for this kind of nonsmooth nonconvex-nonconcave problem in ${\cal O}(ε^{-2}\logε^{-1})$ iterations. Finally, we apply PGmsAD to generalized absolute value equations, generalized linear projection equations and linear regression problems and report the efficiency of PGmsAD on large-scale optimization.

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arXiv2022

Optimal QoS-Aware Network Slicing for Service-Oriented Networks with Flexible Routing

In this paper, we consider the network slicing problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements. We first propose a mixed integer nonlinear program (MINLP) formulation for this problem that optimizes the network resource consumption while jointly considers QoS requirements, flow routing, and resource budget constraints. In particular, the proposed formulation is able to flexibly route the traffic flow of the services on multiple paths and provide end-to-end (E2E) delay and reliability guarantees for all services. Due to the intrinsic nonlinearity, the MINLP formulation is computationally difficult to solve. To overcome this difficulty, we then propose a mixed integer linear program (MILP) formulation and show that the two formulations and their continuous relaxations are equivalent. Different from the continuous relaxation of the MINLP formulation which is a nonconvex nonlinear programming problem, the continuous relaxation of the MILP formulation is a polynomial time solvable linear programming problem, which makes the MILP formulation much more computationally solvable. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed formulations over existing ones.

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arXiv2022

A Novel Negative $\ell_1$ Penalty Approach for Multiuser One-Bit Massive MIMO Downlink with PSK Signaling

This paper considers the one-bit precoding problem for the multiuser downlink massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with phase shift keying (PSK) modulation and focuses on the celebrated constructive interference (CI)-based problem formulation. The existence of the discrete one-bit constraint makes the problem generally hard to solve. In this paper, we propose an efficient negative $\ell_1$ penalty approach for finding a high-quality solution of the considered problem. Specifically, we first propose a novel negative $\ell_1$ penalty model, which penalizes the one-bit constraint into the objective with a negative $\ell_1$-norm term, and show the equivalence between (global and local) solutions of the original problem and the penalty problem when the penalty parameter is sufficiently large. We further transform the penalty model into an equivalent min-max problem and propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for solving it. The AO algorithm enjoys low per-iteration complexity and is guaranteed to converge to the stationary point of the min-max problem. Numerical results show that, compared against the state-of-the-art CI-based algorithms, the proposed algorithm generally achieves better bit-error-rate (BER) performance with lower computational cost.

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arXiv2021

The Augmented Lagrangian Method Can Approximately Solve Convex Optimization with Least Constraint Violation

There are many important practical optimization problems whose feasible regions are not known to be nonempty or not, and optimizers of the objective function with the least constraint violation prefer to be found. A natural way for dealing with these problems is to extend the nonlinear optimization problem as the one optimizing the objective function over the set of points with the least constraint violation. This leads to the study of the shifted problem. This paper focuses on the constrained convex optimization problem. The sufficient condition for the closedness of the set of feasible shifts is presented and the continuity properties of the optimal value function and the solution mapping for the shifted problem are studied. Properties of the conjugate dual of the shifted problem are discussed through the relations between the dual function and the optimal value function. The solvability of the dual of the optimization problem with the least constraint violation is investigated. It is shown that, if the least violated shift is in the domain of the subdifferential of the optimal value function, then this dual problem has an unbounded solution set. Under this condition, the optimality conditions for the problem with the least constraint violation are established in term of the augmented Lagrangian. It is shown that the augmented Lagrangian method has the properties that the sequence of shifts converges to the least violated shift and the sequence of multipliers is unbounded. Moreover, it is proved that the augmented Lagrangian method is able to find an approximate solution to the problem with the least constraint violation.

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arXiv2021

Stability for Constrained Minimax Optimization

Minimax optimization problems are an important class of optimization problems arising from both modern machine learning and from traditional research areas. We focus on the stability of constrained minimax optimization problems based on the notion of local minimax point by Dai and Zhang (2020). Firstly, we extend the classical Jacobian uniqueness conditions of nonlinear programming to the constrained minimax problem and prove that this set of properties is stable with respect to small $C^2$ perturbation. Secondly, we provide a set of conditions, called Property A, which does not require the strict complementarity condition for the upper level constraints. Finally, we prove that Property A is a sufficient condition for the strong regularity of the Kurash-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) system at the KKT point, and it is also a sufficient condition for the local Lipschitzian homeomorphism of the Kojima mapping near the KKT point.

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arXiv2021

A novel augmented Lagrangian method of multipliers for optimization with general inequality constraints

We introduce a twice differentiable augmented Lagrangian for nonlinear optimization with general inequality constraints and show that a strict local minimizer of the original problem is an approximate strict local solution of the augmented Lagrangian. A novel augmented Lagrangian method of multipliers (ALM) is then presented. Our method is originated from a generalization of the Hetenes-Powell augmented Lagrangian, and is a combination of the augmented Lagrangian and the interior-point technique. It shares a similar algorithmic framework with existing ALMs for optimization with inequality constraints, but it can use the second derivatives and does not depend on projections on the set of inequality constraints. In each iteration, our method solves a twice continuously differentiable unconstrained optimization subproblem on primal variables. The dual iterates, penalty and smoothing parameters are updated adaptively. The global and local convergence are analyzed. Without assuming any constraint qualification, it is proved that the proposed method has strong global convergence. The method may converge to either a Kurash-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) point or a singular stationary point when the converging point is a minimizer. It may also converge to an infeasible stationary point of nonlinear program when the problem is infeasible. Furthermore, our method is capable of rapidly detecting the possible infeasibility of the solved problem. Under suitable conditions, it is locally linearly convergent to the KKT point, which is consistent with ALMs for optimization with equality constraints. The preliminary numerical experiments on some small benchmark test problems demonstrate our theoretical results.

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arXiv2021

Optimal Network Slicing for Service-Oriented Networks with Flexible Routing and Guaranteed E2E Latency

Network function virtualization is a promising technology to simultaneously support multiple services with diverse characteristics and requirements in the 5G and beyond networks. In particular, each service consists of a predetermined sequence of functions, called service function chain (SFC), running on a cloud environment. To make different service slices work properly in harmony, it is crucial to appropriately select the cloud nodes to deploy the functions in the SFC and flexibly route the flow of the services such that these functions are processed in the order defined in the corresponding SFC, the end-to-end (E2E) latency constraints of all services are guaranteed, and all cloud and communication resource budget constraints are respected. In this paper, we first propose a new mixed binary linear program (MBLP) formulation of the above network slicing problem that optimizes the system energy efficiency while jointly considers the E2E latency requirement, resource budget, flow routing, and functional instantiation. Then, we develop another MBLP formulation and show that the two formulations are equivalent in the sense that they share the same optimal solution. However, since the numbers of variables and constraints in the second problem formulation are significantly smaller than those in the first one, solving the second problem formulation is more computationally efficient especially when the dimension of the corresponding network is large. Numerical results demonstrate the advantage of the proposed formulations compared with the existing ones.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

An efficient linear programming rounding-and-refinement algorithm for large-scale network slicing problem

In this paper, we consider the network slicing problem which attempts to map multiple customized virtual network requests (also called services) to a common shared network infrastructure and allocate network resources to meet diverse service requirements, and propose an efficient two-stage algorithm for solving this NP-hard problem. In the first stage, the proposed algorithm uses an iterative linear programming (LP) rounding procedure to place the virtual network functions of all services into cloud nodes while taking traffic routing of all services into consideration; in the second stage, the proposed algorithm uses an iterative LP refinement procedure to obtain a solution for traffic routing of all services with their end-to-end delay constraints being satisfied. Compared with the existing algorithms which either have an exponential complexity or return a low-quality solution, our proposed algorithm achieves a better trade-off between solution quality and computational complexity. In particular, the worst-case complexity of our proposed algorithm is polynomial, which makes it suitable for solving large-scale problems. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed algorithm.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2021

Equipping Barzilai-Borwein method with two dimensional quadratic termination property

A novel gradient stepsize is derived at the motivation of equipping the Barzilai-Borwein (BB) method with two dimensional quadratic termination property. A remarkable feature of the novel stepsize is that its computation only depends on the BB stepsizes in previous iterations and does not require any exact line search or the Hessian, and hence it can easily be extended for nonlinear optimization. By adaptively taking long BB steps and some short steps associated with the new stepsize, we develop an efficient gradient method for quadratic optimization and general unconstrained optimization and extend it to solve extreme eigenvalues problems. The proposed method is further extended for box-constrained optimization and singly linearly box-constrained optimization by incorporating gradient projection techniques. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the most successful gradient methods in the literature.

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