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We propose a class of new cutting planes to strengthen the Lov\'asz theta function, a well-known semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation for the stable set and the graph coloring problems. For both problems, we introduce two new cutting planes that are derived from odd-cycle constraints and triangle inequalities and are valid for certain subgraphs induced by odd cycles. Computational experiments on graphs from the literature show that for each problem, one of the proposed cutting planes gives very good bounds.

We consider semidefinite relaxations of Stable-Set and Coloring, which are based on quadratic 0-1 optimization. Information about the stability number and the chromatic number is hidden in the objective function. This leads to simplified relaxations which depend mostly on the number of vertices of the graph. We also propose tightenings of the relaxations which are based on the maximal cliques of the underlying graph. Computational results on graphs from the literature show the strong potential of this new approach.

The "exact subgraph" approach was recently introduced as a hierarchical scheme to get increasingly tight semidefinite programming relaxations of several NP-hard graph optimization problems. Solving these relaxations is a computational challenge because of the potentially large number of violated subgraph constraints. We introduce a computational framework for these relaxations designed to cope with these difficulties. We suggest a partial Lagrangian dual, and exploit the fact that its evaluation decomposes into several independent subproblems. This opens the way to use the bundle method from non-smooth optimization to minimize the dual function. Finally computational experiments on the Max-Cut, stable set and coloring problem show the excellent quality of the bounds obtained with this approach., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1902.05345

Quantum annealing is getting increasing attention in combinatorial optimization. The quantum processing unit by D-Wave is constructed to approximately solve Ising models on so-called Chimera graphs. Ising models are equivalent to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems and maximum cut problems on the associated graphs. We have tailored branch-and-cut as well as semidefinite programming algorithms for solving Ising models for Chimera graphs to provable optimality and use the strength of these approaches for comparing our solution values to those obtained on the current quantum annealing machine D-Wave 2000Q. This allows for the assessment of the quality of solutions produced by the D-Wave hardware. It has been a matter of discussion in the literature how well the D-Wave hardware performs at its native task, and our experiments shed some more light on this issue.

The Bandwidth Problem seeks for a simultaneous permutation of the rows and columns of the adjacency matrix of a graph such that all nonzero entries are as close as possible to the main diagonal. This work focuses on investigating novel approaches to obtain lower bounds for the bandwidth problem. In particular, we use vertex partitions to bound the bandwidth of a graph. Our approach contains prior approaches for bounding the bandwidth as special cases. By varying sizes of partitions, we achieve a trade-off between quality of bounds and efficiency of computing them. To compute lower bounds, we derive a Semidefinite Programming relaxation. We evaluate the performance of our approach on several data sets, including real-world instances., Comment: 4 figures

The 'exact subgraph' approach was recently introduced as a hierarchical scheme to get increasingly tight semidefinite programming relaxations of several NP-hard graph optimization problems. Solving these relaxations is a computational challenge because of the potentially large number of violated subgraph constraints. We introduce a computational framework for these relaxations designed to cope with these difficulties. We suggest a partial Lagrangian dual, and exploit the fact that its evaluation decomposes into two independent subproblems. This opens the way to use the bundle method from non-smooth optimization to minimize the dual function. Computational experiments on the Max-Cut, stable set and coloring problem show the efficiency of this approach.

In the present paper we consider minimization based formulations of inverse problems $(x,\Phi)\in\mbox{argmin}\{\mathcal{J}(x,\Phi;y)\colon(x,\Phi)\in M_{ad}(y) \}$ for the specific but highly relevant case that the admissible set $M_{ad}^\delta(y^\delta)$ is defined by pointwise bounds, which is the case, e.g., if $L^\infty$ constraints on the parameter are imposed in the sense of Ivanov regularization, and the $L^\infty$ noise level in the observations is prescribed in the sense of Morozov regularization. As application examples for this setting we consider three coefficient identification problems in elliptic boundary value problems. Discretization of $(x,\Phi)$ with piecewise constant and piecewise linear finite elements, respectively, leads to finite dimensional nonlinear box constrained minimization problems that can numerically be solved via Gauss-Newton type SQP methods. In our computational experiments we revisit the suggested application examples. In order to speed up the computations and obtain exact numerical solutions we use recently developed active set methods for solving strictly convex quadratic programs with box constraints as subroutines within our Gauss-Newton type SQP approach.

In the context of augmented Lagrangian approaches for solving semidefinite programming problems, we investigate the possibility of eliminating the positive semidefinite constraint on the dual matrix by employing a factorization. Hints on how to deal with the resulting unconstrained maximization of the augmented Lagrangian are given. We further use the approximate maximum of the augmented Lagrangian with the aim of improving the convergence rate of alternating direction augmented Lagrangian frameworks. Numerical results are reported, showing the benefits of the approach., Comment: 7 pages

In this paper we present a method for the regularized solution of nonlinear inverse problems, based on Ivanov regularization (also called method of quasi solutions or constrained least squares regularization). This leads to the minimization of a non-convex cost function under a norm constraint, where non-convexity is caused by nonlinearity of the inverse problem. Minimization is done by iterative approximation, using (non-convex) quadratic Taylor expansions of the cost function. This leads to repeated solution of quadratic trust region subproblems with possibly indefinite Hessian. Thus the key step of the method consists in application of an efficient method for solving such quadratic subproblems, developed by Rendl and Wolkowicz [10]. We here present a convergence analysis of the overall method as well as numerical experiments.

A bipartite graph G is known to be Pfaffian if and only if it does not contain an even subdivision H of $K_{3,3}$ such that $G - VH$ contains a 1-factor. However a general characterisation of Pfaffian graphs in terms of forbidden subgraphs is currently not known. In this paper we describe a possible approach to the derivation of such a characterisation. We also extend the characterisation for bipartite graphs to a slightly more general class of graphs., Comment: added references