The paper addresses parametric inequality systems described by polynomial functions in finite dimensions, where state-dependent infinite parameter sets are given by finitely many polynomial inequalities and equalities. Such systems can be viewed, in particular, as solution sets to problems of generalized semi-infinite programming with polynomial data. Exploiting the imposed polynomial structure together with powerful tools of variational analysis and semialgebraic geometry, we establish a far-going extension of the Łojasiewicz gradient inequality to the general nonsmooth class of supremum marginal functions as well as higher-order (Hölder type) local error bounds results with explicitly calculated exponents. The obtained results are applied to higher-order quantitative stability analysis for various classes of optimization problems including generalized semi-infinite programming with polynomial data, optimization of real polynomials under polynomial matrix inequality constraints, and polynomial second-order cone programming. Other applications provide explicit convergence rate estimates for the cyclic projection algorithm to find common points of convex sets described by matrix polynomial inequalities and for the asymptotic convergence of trajectories of subgradient dynamical systems in semialgebraic settings.

Let each point of a homogeneous Poisson process in ℝ^{$d$}independently be equipped with a random number of stubs (half-edges) according to a given probability distribution$μ$on the positive integers. We consider translation-invariant schemes for perfectly matching the stubs to obtain a simple graph with degree distribution$μ$. Leaving aside degenerate cases, we prove that for any$μ$there exist schemes that give only finite components as well as schemes that give infinite components. For a particular matching scheme which is a natural extension of Gale–Shapley stable marriage, we give sufficient conditions on$μ$for the absence and presence of infinite components.

The free boundary value problem in obstacle problem for von Krmn equations is studied. By using the method of complementarity analysis, Rockafellar's theory of duality is generalized to the nonlinear variational problems and a complementarity theory of obstacle problem for von Krmn plates is established. We prove that the uniqueness and existence of solution directly depend on a complementary gap function. Moreover, a generalized dual extreme principle is established. We prove that the nonlinear primal variational inequality problem is eventually equivalent to a semi-quadratic dual optimization problem defined on a statically admissible space. This equivalence can be used to develop an effective numerical method for solving nonlinear free boundary value problems.

In this paper,we establish the convergence of the proximal alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) and block coordinate descent (BCD) method for nonseparable minimization models with quadratic coupling terms. The novel convergence results presented in this paper answer several open questions that have been the subject of considerable discussion. We firstly extend the 2-block proximal ADMM to linearly constrained convex optimization with a coupled quadratic objective function, an area where theoretical understanding is currently lacking, and prove that the sequence generated by the proximal ADMM converges in point-wise manner to a primal-dual solution pair. Moreover, we apply randomly permuted ADMM (RPADMM) to nonseparable multi-block convex optimization, and prove its expected convergence for a class of nonseparable quadratic programming problems. When the linear constraint vanishes, the 2-block proximal ADMM and RPADMM reduce to the 2-block cyclic proximal BCD method and randomly permuted BCD (RPBCD). Our study provides the first iterate convergence result for 2-block cyclic proximal BCD without assuming the boundedness of the iterates. We also theoretically establish the expected iterate convergence result concerning multi-block RPBCD for convex quadratic optimization. In addition, we demonstrate that RPBCD may have a worse convergence rate than cyclic proximalBCDfor 2-block convex quadratic minimization problems. Although the results on RPADMM and RPBCD are restricted to quadratic minimization models, they provide some interesting insights: (1) random permutation makes ADMM and BCD more robust for multi-block convex minimization problems; (2) cyclic BCD may outperform RPBCD for “nice” problems, and RPBCD should be applied with caution when solving general convex optimization problems especially with a few blocks.

The trust-region problem,which minimizes a nonconvex quadratic function over a ball, is a key subproblem in trust-region methods for solving nonlinear optimization problems. It enjoys many attractive properties such as an exact semi-definite linear programming relaxation (SDP-relaxation) and strong duality. Unfortunately, such properties do not, in general, hold for an extended trust-region problem having extra linear constraints. This paper shows that two useful and powerful features of the classical trust-region problem continue to hold for an extended trust-region problem with linear inequality constraints under a new dimension condition. First, we establish that the class of extended trust-region problems has an exact SDP-relaxation, which holds without the Slater constraint qualification. This is achieved by proving that a system of quadratic and affine functions involved in the model satisfies a range-convexity whenever the dimension condition is fulfilled. Second, we show that the dimension condition together with the Slater condition ensures that a set of combined first and second-order Lagrange multiplier conditions is necessary and sufficient for global optimality of the extended trust-region problem and consequently for strong duality. Through simple examples we also provide an insightful account of our development from SDP-relaxation to strong duality. Finally, we show that the dimension condition is easily satisfied for the extended trust-region model that arises from the reformulation of a robust least squares problem (LSP) as well as a robust second order cone programming model problem (SOCP) as an equivalent semi-definite linear programming problem. This leads us to conclude that, under mild assumptions, solving a robust LSP or SOCP under matrix-norm uncertainty or polyhedral uncertainty is equivalent to solving a semi-definite linear programming problem and so, their solutions can be validated in polynomial time.