Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

At the heart of most algorithms today there is an optimization engine trying to learn online and provide the best decision, for e.g. rankings of objects, at any time with the partial information observed thus far in time. Often it becomes difficult to find near optimal solutions to many problems due to their inherent combinatorial structure that leads to certain computational bottlenecks. Submodularity is a discrete analogue of convexity and is a key property often exploited in tackling combinatorial optimization problems. In the first part of the talk, we will focus on computational bottlenecks that involve submodular functions: (a) convex function minimization over submodular base polytopes (for e.g. permutahedron) and (b) movement along a line inside submodular base polytopes. We give a conceptually simple and strongly polynomial algorithm Inc-Fix for the former, which is useful in computing Bregman projections in first-order projection-based methods like online mirror descent. For the latter, we will bound the iterations of the discrete Newton method which gives a running time improvement of at least n^6 over the state of the art. This is joint work with Michel Goemans and Patrick Jaillet. In the second part of the talk, we will consider the dual problem of (a), i.e. minimization of composite convex and submodular objectives. We will resolve Bach's conjecture from 2015 about the running time of a popular Kelley's cutting plane variant to minimize these composite objectives. This is joint work with Madeleine Udell and Song Zhou.

In this talk, we introduce several models of the so-called forward-forward Mean-Field Games (MFGs). The forward-forward models arise in the study of numerical schemes to approximate stationary MFGs. We establish a link between these models and a class of hyperbolic conservation laws. Furthermore, we investigate the existence of solutions and examine long-time limit properties. Joint work with Diogo Gomes and Levon Nurbekyan.

A sum of squares of real numbers is always nonnegative. This elementary observation is quite powerful, and can be used to prove graph density inequalities in extremal combinatorics, which address so-called Turan problems. This is the essence of semidefinite method of Lov\'{a}sz and Szegedy, and also Cauchy-Schwartz calculus of Razborov. Here multiplication and addition take place in the gluing algebra of partially labelled graphs. This method has been successfully used on many occasions and has also been extensively studied theoretically. There are two competing viewpoints on the power of the sums of squares method. Netzer and Thom refined a Positivstellensatz of Lovasz and Szegedy by showing that if f> 0 is a valid graph density inequality, then for any a>0 the inequality f+a > 0 can be proved via sums of squares. On the other hand, Hatami and Norine showed that testing whether a graph density inequality f > 0 is valid is an undecidable problem, and also provided explicit but complicated examples of inequalities that cannot be proved using sums of squares. I will introduce the sums of squares method, do several examples of sums of squares proofs, and then present simple explicit inequalities that show strong limitations of the sums of squares method. This is joint work in progress with Annie Raymond, Mohit Singh and Rekha Thomas.

TBA