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arXiv:2412.19776 · Journal of Global Optimization

On the numerical solution of Lasserre relaxations of unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problem

Soodeh Habibi, Michal Kočvara, Michael Stingl

Published Jul 1, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract The aim of this paper is to solve linear semidefinite programs arising from higher-order Lasserre relaxations of unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problems. For this we use an interior point method with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method solving the linear systems. The preconditioner utilizes the low-rank structure of the solution of the relaxations. In order to fully exploit this, we need to re-write the moment relaxations. To treat the arising linear equality constraints we use an $$\ell _1$$ ℓ 1 -penalty approach within the interior-point solver. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by numerical experiments with the MAXCUT and other randomly generated problems and a comparison with a state-of-the-art semidefinite solver and the ADMM method. We further propose a hybrid ADMM-interior-point method that proves to be efficient for certain problem classes. As a by-product, we observe that the second-order relaxation is often high enough to deliver a globally optimal solution of the original problem.

DOI
10.1007/s10898-025-01523-3

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Abstract The aim of this paper is to solve linear semidefinite programs arising from higher-order Lasserre relaxations of unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problems. For this we use an interior point method with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method solving the linear systems. The preconditioner utilizes the low-rank structure of the solution of the relaxations. In order to fully exploit this, we need to re-write the moment relaxations. To treat the arising linear equality constraints we use an ℓ1\ell _1ℓ1​ ℓ 1 -penalty approach within the interior-point solver. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by numerical experiments with the MAXCUT and other randomly generated problems and a comparison with a state-of-the-art semidefinite solver and the ADMM method. We further propose a hybrid ADMM-interior-point method that proves to be efficient for certain problem classes. As a by-product, we observe that the second-order relaxation is often high enough to deliver a globally optimal solution of the original problem.
The aim of this paper is to solve linear semidefinite programs arising from higher-order Lasserre relaxations of unconstrained binary quadratic optimization problems. For this we use an interior point method with a preconditioned conjugate gradient method solving the linear systems. The preconditioner utilizes the low-rank structure of the solution of the relaxations. In order to fully exploit this, we need to rewrite the moment relaxations. To treat the arising linear equality constraints we use an 1-penalty approach within the interior-point solver. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by numerical experiments with the MAXCUT and other randomly generated problems and a comparison with a state-of-the-art semidefinite solver and the ADMM method. As a by-product, we observe that the second-order relaxation is often high enough to deliver a globally optimal solution of the original problem.
We consider low-rank semidefinite programming (LRSDP) relaxations of ±1 quadratic problems that can be formulated as the nonconvex nonlinear programming problem of minimizing a quadratic function subject to separable quadratic equality constraints. We prove the equivalence of the LRSDP problem with the unconstrained minimization of a new merit function and we define an effcient and globally convergent algorithm for finding critical points of the LRSDP problem. Finally, we test our code on an extended set of instances of the Max-Cut problem and we report comparisons with other existing codes.
We consider the problem of handling binary constraints in optimization problems. We review methods for solving binary quadratic programs (BQPs), such as the spectral method and semidefinite programming relaxations. We then discuss two new methods for handling these constraints. The first involves the introduction of an extra unconstrained variable along with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), which has now also appeared in other recent literature. This allows the effect of the binary variables to be decoupled when they are minimized over. The second involves rewarding the one-norm while restricting the infinity-norm, based on a reformulation of the original problem. The piecewise linearity of the negative penalty results in the problem being convex until it hits a critical point, at which point the parameters of this linear term can be changed. These two methods can be applied to any problems which are convex except for binary constraints. In addition to testing them on BQPs, we show the efficacy of these approaches on point segmentation and image segmentation problems.
In computer vision, many problems can be formulated as binary quadratic programs (BQPs), which are in general NP hard. Finding a solution when the problem is of large size to be of practical interest typically requires relaxation. Semidefinite relaxation usually yields tight bounds, but its computational complexity is high. In this work, we present a semidefinite programming (SDP) formulation for BQPs, with two desirable properties. First, it produces similar bounds to the standard SDP formulation. Second, compared with the conventional SDP formulation, the proposed SDP formulation leads to a considerably more efficient and scalable dual optimization approach. We then propose two solvers, namely, quasi-Newton and smoothing Newton methods, for the simplified dual problem. Both of them are significantly more efficient than standard interior-point methods. Empirically the smoothing Newton solver is faster than the quasi-Newton solver for dense or medium-sized problems, while the quasi-Newton solver is preferable for large sparse/structured problems.
Based on the semidefinite programming relaxation of the binary quadratic programming, a rank-two feasible direction algorithm is presented. The proposed algorithm restricts the rank of matrix variable to be two in the semidefinite programming relaxation and yields a quadratic objective function with simple quadratic constraints. A feasible direction algorithm is used to solve the nonlinear programming. The convergent analysis and time complexity of the method is given. Coupled with randomized algorithm, a suboptimal solution is obtained for the binary quadratic programming. At last, we report some numerical examples to compare our algorithm with randomized algorithm based on the interior point method and the feasible direction algorithm on max-cut problem. Simulation results have shown that our method is faster than the other two methods.
We consider semidefinite relaxations of a quadratic optimization problem with polynomial constraints. This is an extension of quadratic problems with Boolean variables. Such combinatorial problems cannot, in general, be solved in polynomial time. Semidefinite relaxation has been proposed as a promising technique to give provable good bounds on certain Boolean quadratic problems in polynomial time. We formulate the extensions from Boolean variables to quarternary variables using (i) a polynomial relaxation or (ii) standard semidefinite relaxations of a linear transformation of Boolean variables. We compare the two different relaxation approaches analytically. The relaxations can all be expressed as semidefinite programs, which can be solved efficiently using e.g. interior point methods. Applications of our results include maximum likelihood estimation in communication systems, which we explore in simulations in order to compare the quality of the different relaxations with optimal solutions.