Optimal control problems including partial differential equation (PDE) as well as integer constraints merge the combinatorial difficulties of integer programming and the challenges related to large-scale systems resulting from discretized PDEs. So far, the Branch-and-Bound framework has been the most common solution strategy for such problems. In order to provide an alternative solution approach, especially in a large-scale context, this article investigates penalization techniques. Taking inspiration from a well-known family of existing exact penalty algorithms, a novel improved penalty algorithm is derived, whose key ingredients are a basin hopping strategy and an interior point method, both of which are specialized for the problem class. A thorough numerical investigation is carried out for a standard stationary test problem. Extensions to a convection-diffusion as well as a nonlinear test problem finally demonstrate the versatility of the approach.
Many real-world optimization problems such as engineering design can be eventually modeled as the corresponding multiobjective optimization problems (MOPs) which must be solved to obtain approximate Pareto optimal fronts. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has been regarded as a very promising approach for solving MOPs. Recent studies have shown that MOEA/D with uniform weight vectors is well-suited to MOPs with regular Pareto optimal fronts, but its performance in terms of diversity deteriorates on MOPs with irregular Pareto optimal fronts such as highly nonlinear and convex. In this way, the solution set obtained by the algorithm can not provide more reasonable choices for decision makers. In order to efficiently overcome this drawback, in this paper, we propose an improved MOEA/D algorithm by virtue of the well-known Pascoletti-Serafini scalarization method and a new strategy of multi-reference points. Specifically, this strategy consists of the setting and adaptation of reference points generated by the techniques of equidistant partition and projection. For performance assessment, the proposed algorithm is compared with existing four state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on both benchmark test problems with various types of Pareto optimal fronts and two real-world MOPs including the hatch cover design and the rocket injector design in engineering optimization. According to the experimental results, the proposed algorithm exhibits better diversity performance than that of the other compared algorithms.
In this paper we present a finite element analysis for a Dirichlet boundary control problem governed by the Stokes equation. The Dirichlet control is considered in a convex closed subset of the energy space $\mathbf{H}^1(\Omega).$ Most of the previous works on the Stokes Dirichlet boundary control problem deals with either tangential control or the case where the flux of the control is zero. This choice of the control is very particular and their choice of the formulation leads to the control with limited regularity. To overcome this difficulty, we introduce the Stokes problem with outflow condition and the control acts on the Dirichlet boundary only hence our control is more general and it has both the tangential and normal components. We prove well-posedness and discuss on the regularity of the control problem. The first-order optimality condition for the control leads to a Signorini problem. We develop a two-level finite element discretization by using $\mathbf{P}_1$ elements(on the fine mesh) for the velocity and the control variable and $P_0$ elements (on the coarse mesh) for the pressure variable. The standard energy error analysis gives $\frac{1}{2}+\frac{\delta}{2}$ order of convergence when the control is in $\mathbf{H}^{\frac{3}{2}+\delta}(\Omega)$ space. Here we have improved it to $\frac{1}{2}+\delta,$ which is optimal. Also, when the control lies in less regular space we derived optimal order of convergence up to the regularity. The theoretical results are corroborated by a variety of numerical tests.
In this paper, we shed new light on the generalization ability of deep learning-based solvers for Traveling Salesman Problems (TSP). Specifically, we introduce a two-player zero-sum framework between a trainable \emph{Solver} and a \emph{Data Generator}, where the Solver aims to solve the task instances provided by the Generator, and the Generator aims to generate increasingly difficult instances for improving the Solver. Grounded in \textsl{Policy Space Response Oracle} (PSRO) methods, our two-player framework outputs a population of best-responding Solvers, over which we can mix and output a combined model that achieves the least exploitability against the Generator, and thereby the most generalizable performance on different TSP tasks. We conduct experiments on a variety of TSP instances with different types and sizes. Results suggest that our Solvers achieve the state-of-the-art performance even on tasks the Solver never meets, whilst the performance of other deep learning-based Solvers drops sharply due to over-fitting. On real-world instances from \textsc{TSPLib}, our method also attains a \textbf{12\%} improvement, in terms of optimal gap, over the best baseline model. To demonstrate the principle of our framework, we study the learning outcome of the proposed two-player game and demonstrate that the exploitability of the Solver population decreases during training, and it eventually approximates the Nash equilibrium along with the Generator.
Combining discrete probability distributions and combinatorial optimization problems with neural network components has numerous applications but poses several challenges. We propose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (I-MLE), a framework for end-to-end learning of models combining discrete exponential family distributions and differentiable neural components. I-MLE is widely applicable as it only requires the ability to compute the most probable states and does not rely on smooth relaxations. The framework encompasses several approaches such as perturbation-based implicit differentiation and recent methods to differentiate through black-box combinatorial solvers. We introduce a novel class of noise distributions for approximating marginals via perturb-and-MAP. Moreover, we show that I-MLE simplifies to maximum likelihood estimation when used in some recently studied learning settings that involve combinatorial solvers. Experiments on several datasets suggest that I-MLE is competitive with and often outperforms existing approaches which rely on problem-specific relaxations.
In this paper we are concerned with energy-conserving methods for Poisson problems, which are effectively solved by defining a suitable generalization of HBVMs, a class of energy-conserving methods for Hamiltonian problems. The actual implementation of the methods is fully discussed, with a particular emphasis on the conservation of Casimirs. Some numerical tests are reported, in order to assess the theoretical findings.
This paper investigates the optimality conditions for characterizing the local minimizers of the constrained optimization problems involving an $\ell_p$ norm ($0<p<1$) of the variables, which may appear in either the objective or the constraint. This kind of problems have strong applicability to a wide range of areas since usually the $\ell_p$ norm can promote sparse solutions. However, the nonsmooth and non-Lipschtiz nature of the $\ell_p$ norm often cause these problems difficult to analyze and solve. We provide the calculation of the subgradients of the $\ell_p$ norm and the normal cones of the $\ell_p$ ball. For both problems, we derive the first-order necessary conditions under various constraint qualifications. We also derive the sequential optimality conditions for both problems and study the conditions under which these conditions imply the first-order necessary conditions. We point out that the sequential optimality conditions can be easily satisfied for iteratively reweighted algorithms and show that the global convergence can be easily derived using sequential optimality conditions.
Many real-world optimization problems such as engineering design are finally modeled as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP) which must be solved to get a set of trade-offs. Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D) has been regarded as a very promising approach for solving MOPs, which offers a general algorithmic framework of evolutionary multiobjective optimization. Recent studies have shown that MOEA/D with uniformly distributed weight vectors is well-suited to MOPs with regular Pareto optimal front, but its performance in terms of diversity deteriorates on MOPs with irregular Pareto optimal front such as highly nonlinear and convex. In this way, the solution set obtained by the algorithm can not provide more reasonable choices for decision makers. In order to efficiently overcome this shortcoming, in this paper, we propose an improved MOEA/D algorithm by virtue of the well-known Pascoletti-Serafini scalarization method and a new strategy of multi-reference points. Specifically, this strategy consists of the setting and adaptation of reference points generated by the techniques of equidistant partition and projection. For performance assessment, the proposed algorithm is compared with existing four state-of-the-art multiobjective evolutionary algorithms on both benchmark test problems with various types of Pareto optimal fronts and two real-world MOPs including the hatch cover design and the rocket injector design in engineering optimization. Experimental results reveal that the proposed algorithm is better than that of the other compared algorithms in diversity.
Backtracking is an inexact line search procedure that selects the first value in a sequence $x_0, x_0\beta, x_0\beta^2...$ that satisfies $g(x)\leq 0$ on $\mathbb{R}_+$ with $g(x)\leq 0$ iff $x\leq x^*$. This procedure is widely used in descent direction optimization algorithms with Armijo-type conditions. It both returns an estimate in $(\beta x^*,x^*]$ and enjoys an upper-bound $\lceil \log_{\beta} \epsilon/x_0 \rceil$ on the number of function evaluations to terminate, with $\epsilon$ a lower bound on $x^*$. The basic bracketing mechanism employed in several root-searching methods is adapted here for the purpose of performing inexact line searches, leading to a new class of inexact line search procedures. The traditional bisection algorithm for root-searching is transposed into a very simple method that completes the same inexact line search in at most $\lceil \log_2 \log_{\beta} \epsilon/x_0 \rceil$ function evaluations. A recent bracketing algorithm for root-searching which presents both minmax function evaluation cost (as the bisection algorithm) and superlinear convergence is also transposed, asymptotically requiring $\sim \log \log \log \epsilon/x_0 $ function evaluations for sufficiently smooth functions. Other bracketing algorithms for root-searching can be adapted in the same way. Numerical experiments suggest time savings of 50\% to 80\% in each call to the inexact search procedure.
Interpretation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) training as an optimal control problem with nonlinear dynamical systems has received considerable attention recently, yet the algorithmic development remains relatively limited. In this work, we make an attempt along this line by reformulating the training procedure from the trajectory optimization perspective. We first show that most widely-used algorithms for training DNNs can be linked to the Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP), a celebrated second-order trajectory optimization algorithm rooted in the Approximate Dynamic Programming. In this vein, we propose a new variant of DDP that can accept batch optimization for training feedforward networks, while integrating naturally with the recent progress in curvature approximation. The resulting algorithm features layer-wise feedback policies which improve convergence rate and reduce sensitivity to hyper-parameter over existing methods. We show that the algorithm is competitive against state-ofthe-art first and second order methods. Our work opens up new avenues for principled algorithmic design built upon the optimal control theory.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.