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Yuan’s theorem of the alternative is an important theoretical tool in optimization, which provides a checkable certificate for the infeasibility of a strict inequality system involving two homogeneous quadratic functions. In this paper, we provide a tractable extension of Yuan’s theorem of the alternative to the symmetric tensor setting. As an application, we establish that the optimal value of a class of nonconvex polynomial optimization problems with suitable sign structure (or more explicitly, with essentially nonpositive coefficients) can be computed by a related convex conic programming problem, and the optimal solution of these nonconvex polynomial optimization problems can be recovered from the corresponding solution of the convex conic programming problem. Moreover, we obtain that this class of nonconvex polynomial optimization problems enjoy exact sum-of-squares relaxation, and so, can be solved via a single semidefinite programming problem.

We study inhomogeneous random graphs in the subcritical case. Among other results, we derive an exact formula for the size of the largest connected component scaled by log$n$, with$n$being the size of the graph. This generalizes a result for the “rank-1 case”. We also investigate branching processes associated with these graphs. In particular, we discover that the same well-known equation for the survival probability, whose positive solution determines the asymptotics of the size of the largest component in the supercritical case, also plays a crucial role in the subcritical case. However, now it is the$negative$solutions that come into play. We disclose their relationship to the distribution of the progeny of the branching process.

Many iterative methods in optimization are fixed-point iterations with averaged operators. As such methods converge at an O(1/k) rate with the constant determined by the averagedness coefficient, establishing small averagedness coefficients for operators is of broad interest. In this paper, we show that the averagedness coefficients of the composition of averaged operators by Ogura and Yamada (Numer Func Anal Opt 32(1–2):113–137, 2002) and the threeoperator splitting by Davis and Yin (Set Valued Var Anal 25(4):829–858, 2017) are tight. The analysis relies on the scaled relative graph, a geometric tool recently proposed by Ryu, Hannah, and Yin (arXiv:1902.09788, 2019).