On the $Ω(n)$ SDP relaxation gap for Submodular Box-Constrained Quadratic Programming

Abstract

Continuous submodular optimization is an important class of nonconvex problems with global guarantees, for which the submodular box-constrained quadratic programming (BCQP) forms a fundamental subclass. It arises naturally as quadratic subproblems of general twice-differentiable submodular problems and also has direct business and management applications such as pricing. This paper studies the worst-case relaxation gap of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations with a finite family of valid linear cuts for submodular BCQP. We show that in dimension $n\geq4$, for any SDP relaxation formulated with a finite family of linear cuts, there always exists a submodular BCQP instance with a strictly positive relaxation gap. By restricting to the normalized BCQP instances that remove the problem's scaling factor, we further quantify this limitation with explicit lower bounds. In general dimension $n\geq4$, when the SDP relaxation is formulated with only Boolean-quadric-polytope (BQP) valid cuts, including the commonly used McCormick and triangle inequalities, we establish an $Ω(n)$ relaxation gap lower bound. For an arbitrary family of $m$ valid linear cuts, we establish an $Ω(n/m^2)$ lower bound. These results capture the fundamental limitations of SDP relaxations, especially SDP with BQP valid cuts, and provide guidance on what additional constraints may be needed for more effective convex approximations of submodular BCQP.