The Kaczmarz method is an iterative method for solving large systems of equations that projects iterates orthogonally onto the solution space of each equation. In contrast to direct methods such as Gaussian elimination or QR-factorization, this algorithm is efficient for problems with sparse matrices, as they appear in constraint-based user interface (UI) layout specifications. However, the Kaczmarz method as described in the literature has its limitations: it considers only equality constraints and does not support soft constraints, which makes it inapplicable to the UI layout problem. In this paper we extend the Kaczmarz method for solving specifications containing soft constraints, using the prioritized IIS detection algorithm. Furthermore, the performance and convergence of the proposed algorithms are evaluated empirically using randomly generated UI layout specifications of various sizes. The results show that these methods offer improvements in performance over standard methods like Matlab's LINPROG, a well-known efficient linear programming solver.
Most of the direct methods for soft constraint problems are least-squares methods such as LU-decompos -ition and QR-decompo -sition @cite_30 . The UI layout solver HiRise @cite_33 is an example of this category. HiRise2 @cite_22 is an extended version of the HiRise constraint solver which solves hierarchies of linear constraints by applying an LU-decompos -ition-based simplex method.
@cite_30 @cite_22 @cite_33
1993924106 1252747413 2035233604 2158863086
We propose a scalable algorithm called HiRise2 for incrementally solving soft linear constraints over real domains. It is based on a framework for soft constraints, known as constraint hierarchies, to allow effective modeling of user interface applications by using hierarchical preferences for constraints. HiRise2 introduces LU decompositions to improve the scalability of an incremental simplex method. Using this algorithm, we implemented a constraint solver. We also show the results of experiments on the performance of the solver. This paper presents a fast direct solver for 3D discretized linear systems using the supernodal multifrontal method together with low-rank approximations. For linear systems arising from certain partial differential equations (PDEs) such as elliptic equations, during the Gaussian elimination of the matrices with Nested Dissection ordering, the fill-in of L and U factors loses its sparsity and contains dense blocks with low-rank property. Off-diagonal blocks can be efficiently approximated with low-rank matrices; diagonal blocks approximated with semiseparable structures called hierarchically semiseparable (HSS) representations. Matrix operations in the multifrontal method are performed in low-rank arithmetic. We present efficient way to organize the HSS structured operations along the elimination. To compress dense blocks into low-rank or HSS structures, we use effective cross approximation (CA) approach. We also use idea of adaptive balancing between robust arithmetic for computing the small dense blocks and low-rank matrix operations for handling with compressed ones while performing the Gaussian elimination. This new proposed solver can be essentially parallelized both on architecture with shared and distributed memory and can be used as effective preconditioner. To check efficient of our solver we compare it with Intel MKL PARDISO - the high performance direct solver. Memory and performance tests demonstrate up to 3 times performance and memory gain for the 3D problems with more than (10^6 ) unknowns. Therefore, proposed multifrontal HSS solver can solve large problems, which cannot be resolved by direct solvers because of large memory consumptions. In this paper, we study decomposition methods based on separable approximations for minimizing the augmented Lagrangian. In particular, we study and compare the diagonal quadratic approximation method DQAM of Mulvey and Ruszczynski [A diagonal quadratic approximation method for large scale linear programs, Oper. Res. Lett. 12 1992, pp. 205–215] and the parallel coordinate descent method PCDM of Richtarik and Takac [Parallel coordinate descent methods for big data optimization. Technical report, November 2012. arXiv:1212.0873]. We show that the two methods are equivalent for feasibility problems up to the selection of a step-size parameter. Furthermore, we prove an improved complexity bound for PCDM under strong convexity, and show that this bound is at least 8L′ Lω−12 times better than the best known bound for DQAM, where ω is the degree of partial separability and L’ and L are the maximum and average of the block Lipschitz constants of the gradient of the quadratic penalty appearing in the augmented Lagrangian. A number of linear programming relaxations have been proposed for finding most likely settings of the variables (MAP) in large probabilistic models. The relaxations are often succinctly expressed in the dual and reduce to dierent types of reparameterizations of the original model. The dual objectives are typically solved by performing local block coordinate descent steps. In this work, we show how to perform block coordinate descent on spanning trees of the graphical model. We also show how all of the earlier dual algorithms are related to each other, giving transformations from one type of reparameterization to another while maintaining monotonicity relative to a common objective function. Finally, we quantify when the MAP solution can and cannot be decoded directly from the dual LP relaxation.