A popular approach to solving the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) is to reformulate it as the global minimization of a certain merit function over ^<i>n</i>. A popular choice of the merit function is the squared norm of the Fischer-Burmeister function, shown to be smooth over ^<i>n</i> and, for monotone NCP, each stationary point is a solution of the NCP. This merit function and its analysis were subsequently extended to the semidefinite complementarity problem (SDCP), although only differentiability, not continuous differentiability, was established. In this paper, we extend this merit function and its analysis, including continuous differentiability, to the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP). Although SOCCP is reducible to a SDCP, the reduction does not allow for easy translation of the analysis from SDCP to SOCCP. Instead, our analysis exploits

This paper considers the problem of solving systems of quadratic equations, namely, recovering an object of interest \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} from \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} quadratic equations/samples \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} , \mathbf {x}^{atural}\in\mathbb {R}^{n} . This problem, also dubbed as phase retrieval, spans multiple domains including physical sciences and machine learning.

A fundamental and very well studied region of the Erdős–Rényi process is the phase transition at$m$∼$n$/2 edges in which a giant component suddenly appears. We examine the process beginning with an initial graph. We further examine the Bohman–Frieze process in which edges between isolated vertices are more likely. While the positions of the phase transitions vary, the three processes belong, roughly speaking, to the same universality class. In particular, the growth of the giant component in the barely supercritical region is linear in all cases.

The Mumford–Shah model is one of the most important image segmentation models and has been studied extensively in the last twenty years. In this paper, we propose a two-stage segmentation method based on the Mumford–Shah model. The first stage of our method is to find a smooth solution g to a convex variant of the Mumford–Shah model. Once g is obtained, then in the second stage the segmentation is done by thresholding g into different phases. The thresholds can be given by the users or can be obtained automatically using any clustering methods. Because of the convexity of the model, g can be solved efficiently by techniques like the split-Bregman algorithm or the Chambolle–Pock method. We prove that our method is convergent and that the solution g is always unique. In our method, there is no need to specify the number of segments K (K ≥ 2) before finding g. We can obtain any K-phase segmentations by choosing (K − 1) thresholds after g is found in the first stage, and in the second stage there is no need to recompute g if the thresholds are changed to reveal different segmentation features in the image. Experimental results show that our two-stage method performs better than many standard two-phase or multiphase segmentation methods for very general images, including antimass, tubular, MRI, noisy, and blurry images.

Abstract Recently, J.-S. Chen and P. Tseng extended two merit functions for the nonlinear complementarity problem (NCP) and the semidefinite complementarity problem (SDCP) to the second-order cone commplementarity problem (SOCCP) and showed several favorable properties. In this paper, we extend a merit function for the NCP studied by Yamada, Yamashita, and Fukushima to the SOCCP and show that the SOCCP is equivalent to an unconstrained smooth minimization via this new merit function. Furthermore, we study conditions under which the new merit function provides a global error bound which plays an important role in analyzing the convergence rate of iterative methods for solving the SOCCP; and conditions under which the new merit function has bounded level sets which ensures that the sequence generated by a descent method has at least one accumulation point.