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International Journal of Operational Research

A first augmented Lagrangian method for binary QCQP problems based on a class of continuous functions

Nirakar Sahoo, Rupaj Kumar Nayak

Published Jan 1, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This paper addresses the solution of a non-convex 0-1 QCQP using two faster convergent augmented Lagrangian methods (ALM) based on a class of continuous functions and a parameter free convexification method. The binary constraints are converted into a class of continuous functions and the non-convex constraints are convexified by a parameter free method. The proposed algorithm is then tested on a set of QCQP problems available in the research of Zheng and co-workers. We also present the comparison results among relaxed versions of SDPs and some state-of-the-art ALMs and obtained an advantage over their counterparts.

DOI
10.1504/ijor.2026.151741

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This paper addresses the solution of a non-convex 0-1 QCQP using two faster convergent augmented Lagrangian methods (ALM) based on a class of continuous functions and a parameter free convexification method. The binary constraints are converted into a class of continuous functions and the non-convex constraints are convexified by a parameter free method. The proposed algorithm is then tested on a set of QCQP problems available in the research of Zheng and co-workers. We also present the comparison results among relaxed versions of SDPs and some state-of-the-art ALMs and obtained an advantage over their counterparts.
The class of mixed-integer quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQP) consists of minimizing a quadratic function under quadratic constraints where the variables could be integer or continuous. On a previous paper we introduced a method called MIQCR for solving QCQPs with the following restriction: all quadratic sub-functions of purely continuous variables are already convex. In this paper, we propose an extension of MIQCR which applies to any QCQP. Let (P) be a QCQP. Our approach to solve (P) is first to build an equivalent mixed-integer quadratic problem (P∗). This equivalent problem (P∗) has a quadratic convex objective function, linear constraints, and additional variables y that are meant to satisfy the additional quadratic constraints y=xxT, where x are the initial variables of problem (P). We then propose to solve (P∗) by a branch-and-bound algorithm based on the relaxation of the additional quadratic constraints and of the integrality constraints. This type of branching is known as spatial branch-and-bound. Computational experiences are carried out on a total of 325 instances. The results show that the solution time of most of the considered instances is improved by our method in comparison with the recent implementation of QuadProgBB, and with the solvers Cplex, Couenne, Scip, BARON and GloMIQO.
ABSTRACT Quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problems appear in a wide range of engineering fields, including computer science, communication engineering, and finance. A key difficulty in solving these problems lies in efficiently finding global solutions, especially for large-scale and nonconvex instances. To address this, Wen & Yin (2013) proposed a method that reformulates semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations of QCQPs into a nonlinear and nonconvex low-rank problem. This reformulated problem can be efficiently solved using a curvilinear search method combined with Barzilai-Borwein (BB) steps, known as the CSBB algorithm. In this study, we compare two approaches for solving QCQPs: the conventional convex SDP relaxation and the nonconvex low-rank reformulation introduced by Wen and Yin. We propose a set of general QCQP models that are compatible with the low-rank framework and conduct a series of numerical experiments to evaluate their performance. This study evaluates performance using several classes of NP-hard problems, including Binary Integer Quadratic (BIQ) problems, Max-Cut problems, Boolean Least Squares (BLS) problems, and 0-1 Quadratic Knapsack Problems (QKP). The results demonstrate that the low-rank approach offers competitive performance and shows strong potential for solving large-scale QCQPs more efficiently than traditional convex methods.
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.
We present an iterative algorithm to compute feasible solutions in reasonable running time to quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQPs), which form a challenging class of nonconvex continuous optimization. This algorithm is based on a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) which is a restriction of the original QCQP obtained by discretizing all quadratic terms. In each iteration, this MILP restriction is solved to get a feasible QCQP solution. Since the quality of this solution heavily depends on the chosen discretization of the MILP, we iteratively adapt the discretization values based on the MILP solution of the previous iteration. To maintain a reasonable problem size in each iteration of the algorithm, the discretization sizes are fixed at predefined values. Although our algorithm did not always yield good feasible solutions on arbitrary QCQP instances, an extensive computational study on almost 1300 test instances of two different problem classes - box-constrained quadratic programs with complementarity constraints and disjoint bilinear programs, demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. We compare the quality of our solutions against those from heuristics and local optimization algorithms in two state-of-the-art commercial solvers and observe that on one instance class we clearly outperform the other methods whereas on the other class we obtain competitive results.