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In this paper, we study the existence of local and global saddle points for nonlinear second-order cone programming problems. The existence of local saddle points is developed by using the second-order sufficient conditions, in which a sigma-term is added to reflect the curvature of second-order cone. Furthermore, by dealing with the perturbation of the primal problem, we establish the existence of global saddle points, which can be applicable for the case of multiple optimal solutions. The close relationship between global saddle points and exact penalty representations are discussed as well.

We introduce an entropy-like proximal algorithm for the problem of minimizing a closed proper convex function subject to symmetric cone constraints. The algorithm is based on a distance-like function that is an extension of the Kullback-Leiber relative entropy to the setting of symmetric cones. Like the proximal algorithms for convex programming with nonnegative orthant cone constraints, we show that, under some mild assumptions, the sequence generated by the proposed algorithm is bounded and every accumulation point is a solution of the considered problem. In addition, we also present a dual application of the proposed algorithm to the symmetric cone linear program, leading to a multiplier method which is shown to possess similar properties as the exponential multiplier method (Tseng and Bertsekas in Math. Program. 60:119, 1993) holds.

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We consider a class of derivative-free descent methods for solving the second-order cone complementarity problem (SOCCP). The algorithm is based on the FischerBurmeister (FB) unconstrained minimization reformulation of the SOCCP, and utilizes a convex combination of the negative partial gradients of the FB merit function _FB as the search direction. We establish the global convergence results of the algorithm under monotonicity and the uniform Jordan <i>P</i>-property, and show that under strong monotonicity the merit function value sequence generated converges at a linear rate to zero. Particularly, the rate of convergence is dependent on the structure of second-order cones. Numerical comparisons are also made with the limited BFGS method used by Chen and Tseng (<i>An unconstrained smooth minimization reformulation of the second-order cone complementarity problem</i>, Math. Program. 104(2005), pp