In Rothvo it was shown that there exists a 0 1 polytope (a polytope whose vertices are in 0,1 ^ n ) such that any higher-dimensional polytope projecting to it must have 2^ (n) facets, i.e., its linear extension complexity is exponential. The question whether there exists a 0 1 polytope with high PSD extension complexity was left open. We answer this question in the affirmative by showing that there is a 0 1 polytope such that any spectrahedron projecting to it must be the intersection of a semidefinite cone of dimension 2^ (n) and an affine space. Our proof relies on a new technique to rescale semidefinite factorizations.
The basis for the study of linear and semidefinite extended formulations is the work of Yannakakis (see @cite_11 and @cite_15 ). The existence of a 0 1 polytope with exponential extension complexity was shown in @cite_13 which in turn was inspired by @cite_9 . The first explicit example, answering a long standing open problem of Yannakakis, was provided in @cite_7 which, together with @cite_2 , also lay the foundation for the study of extended formulations over general closed convex cones. In @cite_7 it was also shown that there exist matrices with large nonnegative rank but small semidefinite rank, indicating that semidefinite extended formulations can be exponentially stronger than linear ones, however falling short of giving an explicit proof. They thereby separated the expressive power of linear programs from those of semidefinite programs and raised the question:
@cite_7 @cite_9 @cite_2 @cite_15 @cite_13 @cite_11
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In this paper, we consider conic programming problems whose constraints consist of linear equalities, linear inequalities, a nonpolyhedral cone, and a polyhedral cone. A convenient way for solving this class of problems is to apply the directly extended alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) to its dual problem, which has been observed to perform well in numerical computations but may diverge in theory. Ideally, one should find a convergent variant which is at least as efficient as the directly extended ADMM in practice. We achieve this goal by designing a convergent semiproximal ADMM (called sPADMM3c for convenience) for convex programming problems having three separable blocks in the objective function with the third part being linear. At each iteration, the proposed sPADMM3c takes one special block coordinate descent (BCD) cycle with the order @math , instead of the usual @math Gauss--Seidel BCD cycle used in the nonconvergent directly extended 3-block ADMM, for updating the variable blocks. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the convergent method is at least 20 faster than the directly extended ADMM with unit step-length for the vast majority of about 550 large-scale doubly nonnegative semidefinite programming problems with linear equality and or inequality constraints. This confirms that at least for conic convex programming, one can design a convergent and efficient ADMM with a special BCD cycle of updating the variable blocks. We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on n-vertex graphs are not the linear image of the feasible region of any SDP (i.e., any spectrahedron) of dimension less than 2nδ, for some constant δ > 0. This result yields the first super-polynomial lower bounds on the semidefinite extension complexity of any explicit family of polytopes. Our results follow from a general technique for proving lower bounds on the positive semidefinite rank of a matrix. To this end, we establish a close connection between arbitrary SDPs and those arising from the sum-of-squares SDP hierarchy. For approximating maximum constraint satisfaction problems, we prove that SDPs of polynomial-size are equivalent in power to those arising from degree-O(1) sum-of-squares relaxations. This result implies, for instance, that no family of polynomial-size SDP relaxations can achieve better than a 7 8-approximation for max-sat. Mulmuley [Mul12a] recently gave an explicit version of Noether’s Normalization lemma for ring of invariants of matrices under simultaneous conjugation, under the conjecture that there are deterministic black-box algorithms for polynomial identity testing (PIT). He argued that this gives evidence that constructing such algorithms for PIT is beyond current techniques. In this work, we show this is not the case. That is, we improve Mulmuley’s reduction and correspondingly weaken the conjecture regarding PIT needed to give explicit Noether Normalization. We then observe that the weaker conjecture has recently been nearly settled by the authors ([FS12]), who gave quasipolynomial size hitting sets for the class of read-once oblivious algebraic branching programs (ROABPs). This gives the desired explicit Noether Normalization unconditionally, up to quasipolynomial factors. As a consequence of our proof we give a deterministic parallel polynomial-time algorithm for deciding if two matrix tuples have intersecting orbit closures, under simultaneous conjugation. We also study the strength of conjectures that Mulmuley requires to obtain similar results as ours. We prove that his conjectures are stronger, in the sense that the computational model he needs PIT algorithms for is equivalent to the well-known algebraic branching program (ABP) model, which is provably stronger than the ROABP model. Finally, we consider the depth-3 diagonal circuit model as defined by Saxena [Sax08], as PIT algorithms for this model also have implications in Mulmuley’s work. Previous work (such as [ASS12] and [FS12]) have given quasipolynomial size hitting sets for this model. In this work, we give a much simpler construction of such hitting sets, using techniques of Shpilka and Volkovich [SV09]. This survey is concerned with the size of perfect formulations for combinatorial optimization problems. By “perfect formulation”, we mean a system of linear inequalities that describes the convex hull of feasible solutions, viewed as vectors. Natural perfect formulations often have a number of inequalities that is exponential in the size of the data needed to describe the problem. Here we are particularly interested in situations where the addition of a polynomial number of extra variables allows a formulation with a polynomial number of inequalities. Such formulations are called “compact extended formulations”. We survey various tools for deriving and studying extended formulations, such as Fourier’s procedure for projection, Minkowski–Weyl’s theorem, Balas’ theorem for the union of polyhedra, Yannakakis’ theorem on the size of an extended formulation, dynamic programming, and variable discretization. For each tool that we introduce, we present one or several examples of how this tool is applied. In particular, we present compact extended formulations for several graph problems involving cuts, trees, cycles and matchings, and for the mixing set. We also present Bienstock’s approximate compact extended formulation for the knapsack problem, Goemans’ result on the size of an extended formulation for the permutahedron, and the Faenza-Kaibel extended formulation for orbitopes.