Abstract. We develop a new “subspace layered least squares" interior point method (IPM) for solving linear programs. Applied to an [Formula: see text]-variable linear program in standard form, the iteration complexity of our IPM is up to an [Formula: see text] factor upper bounded by the straight-line complexity (SLC) of the linear program. This term refers to the minimum number of segments of any piecewise linear curve that traverses the wide neighborhood of the central path, a lower bound on the iteration complexity of any IPM that follows a piecewise linear trajectory along a path induced by a self-concordant barrier. In particular, our algorithm matches the number of iterations of any such IPM up to the same factor [Formula: see text]. As our second contribution, we show that the SLC of any linear program is upper bounded by [Formula: see text], which implies that our IPM’s iteration complexity is at most exponential. This is in contrast to existing iteration complexity bounds that depend on either bit complexity or condition measures; these can be unbounded in the problem dimension. We achieve our upper bound by showing that the central path is well-approximated by a combinatorial proxy we call the max central path, which consists of [Formula: see text] shadow vertex simplex paths. Our upper bound complements the lower bounds of Allamigeon et al. [ SIAM J. Appl. Algebra Geom., 2 (2018), pp. 140–178] and Allamigeon, Gaubert, and Vandame [ No self-concordant barrier interior point method is strongly polynomial, 2022], who constructed linear programs with exponential SLC. Finally, we show that each iteration of our IPM can be implemented in strongly polynomial time. Along the way, we develop a deterministic algorithm that approximates the singular value decomposition of a matrix in strongly polynomial time to high accuracy, which may be of independent interest.

We give a strongly polynomial algorithm for minimum cost generalized flow, and hence for optimizing any linear program with at most two non-zero entries per row, or at most two non-zero entries per column. Primal and dual feasibility were shown by Végh ‍(MOR ’17) and Megiddo ‍(SICOMP ’83), respectively. Our result can be viewed as progress towards understanding whether all linear programs can be solved in strongly polynomial time, also referred to as Smale’s 9th problem. Our approach is based on the recent primal-dual interior point method (IPM) by Allamigeon, Dadush, Loho, Natura, and Végh ‍(FOCS ’22). The number of iterations needed by the IPM is bounded, up to a polynomial factor in the number of inequalities, by the straight line complexity of the central path. Roughly speaking, this is the minimum number of pieces of any piecewise linear curve that multiplicatively approximates the central path. As our main contribution, we show that the straight line complexity of any minimum cost generalized flow instance is polynomial in the number of arcs and vertices. By applying a reduction of Hochbaum ‍(ORL ’04), the same bound applies to any linear program with at most two non-zeros per column or per row. To be able to run the IPM, one requires a suitable initial point. For this purpose, we develop a novel multistage approach, where each stage can be solved in strongly polynomial time given the result of the previous stage. Beyond this, substantial work is needed to ensure that the bit complexity of each iterate remains bounded during the execution of the algorithm. For this purpose, we show that one can maintain a representation of the iterates as a low complexity convex combination of vertices and extreme rays. Our approach is black-box and can be applied to any log-barrier path-following method.

We propose a new comprehensive solution to global interconnect optimization. Traditional buffering algorithms mostly insert repeaters on a net-by-net basis based on slacks and possibly guided by global wires. We show how to integrate routing congestion, placement congestion, global timing constraints, power consumption, and additional constraints into a single resource sharing formulation. The core of our algorithm is a new buffered routing subroutine. Given a net and Lagrangean resource prices for routing, timing, placement, and power, it computes a buffered Steiner tree. The resource sharing framework provides a special multiplicative price update for fast convergence. Our algorithm is fast enough for practical instances. We demonstrate experimentally on 7nm microprocessor units that it significantly improves timing while reducing netlength and power consumption in an industrial design flow. Our implementation scales well under parallelization with up to 128 threads.

We introduce the problem of finding a set $B$ of $k$ points in $[0,1]^n$ such that the expected cost of the cheapest point in $B$ that dominates a random point from $[0,1]^n$ is minimized. We study the case where the coordinates of the random points are independently distributed and the cost function is linear. This problem arises naturally in various application areas where customers' requests are satisfied based on predefined products, each corresponding to a subset of features. We show that the problem is NP-hard already for $k=2$ when each coordinate is drawn from $\{0,1\}$, and obtain an FPTAS for general fixed $k$ under mild assumptions on the distributions.

Whereas interior point methods provide polynomial-time linear programming algorithms, the running time bounds depend on bit-complexity or condition measures that can be unbounded in the problem dimension. This is in contrast with the simplex method that always admits an exponential bound. We introduce a new polynomial-time path-following interior point method where the number of iterations also admits a combinatorial upper bound $O(2^{n}n^{15}\log n)$ for an n-variable linear program in standard form. This complements previous work by Allamigeon, Benchimol, Gaubert, and Joswig (SIAGA 2018) that exhibited a family of instances where any path-following method must take exponentially many iterations. The number of iterations of our algorithm is at most $O(n^{15}\log n)$ times the number of segments of any piecewise linear curve in the wide neighborhood of the central path. In particular, it matches the number of iterations of any path following interior point method up to this polynomial factor. The overall exponential upper bound derives from studying the max central path’, a piecewise-linear curve with the number of pieces bounded by the total length of 2n shadow vertex simplex paths. From the existence of a line segment in the wide neighborhood we derive strong implications on the structure of the corresponding segment of the central path. Our algorithm is able to detect this structure from the local geometry at the current iterate, and constructs a step direction that descends along this segment. The bound $O(n^{15}\log n)$ that applies for arbitrarily long line segments is derived from a combinatorial progress measure. Our algorithm falls into the family of layered least squares interior point methods introduced by Vavasis and Ye (Math. Prog. 1996). In contrast to previous layered least squares methods that partition the kernel of the constraint matrix into coordinate subspaces, our method creates layers based on a general subspace providing more flexibility. Our result also implies the same bound on the number of iterations of the trust region interior point method by Lan, Monteiro, and Tsuchiya (SIOPT 2009).

We present a faster interior-point method for optimizing sum-of-squares (SOS) polynomials, which are a central tool in polynomial optimization and capture convex programming in the Lasserre hierarchy. Let p = ∑_i q²_i be an n-variate SOS polynomial of degree 2d. Denoting by L : = binom(n+d,d) and U : = binom(n+2d,2d) the dimensions of the vector spaces in which q_i’s and p live respectively, our algorithm runs in time Õ(LU^{1.87}). This is polynomially faster than state-of-art SOS and semidefinite programming solvers [Jiang et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2021; Papp and Yildiz, 2019], which achieve runtime Õ(L^{0.5} min{U^{2.37}, L^{4.24}}). The centerpiece of our algorithm is a dynamic data structure for maintaining the inverse of the Hessian of the SOS barrier function under the polynomial interpolant basis [Papp and Yildiz, 2019], which efficiently extends to multivariate SOS optimization, and requires maintaining spectral approximations to low-rank perturbations of elementwise (Hadamard) products. This is the main challenge and departure from recent IPM breakthroughs using inverse-maintenance, where low-rank updates to the slack matrix readily imply the same for the Hessian matrix.

In breakthrough work, Tardos (Oper. Res. '86) gave a proximity based framework for solving linear programming (LP) in time depending only on the constraint matrix in the bit complexity model. In Tardos's framework, one reduces solving the LP min(c, x), Ax=b, x ≥ 0, A Zm×n, to solving O(nm) LPs in A having small integer coefficient objectives and right-hand sides using any exact LP algorithm. This gives rise to an LP algorithm in time poly (n, m log ΔA), where ΔAis the largest subdeterminant of A. A significant extension to the real model of computation was given by Vavasis and Ye (Math. Prog. '96), giving a specialized interior point method that runs in time poly (n, m,log χ̑A), depending on Stewart's χ̑A, a well-studied condition number. In this work, we extend Tardos's original framework to obtain such a running time dependence. In particular, we replace the exact LP solves with approximate ones, enabling us to directly leverage the tremendous recent algorithmic progress for approximate linear programming. More precisely, we show that the fundamental “accuracy” needed to exactly solve any LP in A is inverse polynomial in n and log χ̑A. Plugging in the recent algorithm of van den Brand (SODA '20), our method computes an optimal primal and dual solution using O(mnω+1+0(1)log(χ̑A+n)) arithmetic operations, outperforming the specialized interior point method of Vavasis and Ye and its recent improvement by Dadush et al (STOC '20). By applying the preprocessing algorithm of the latter paper, the dependence can also be reduced from χ̑Ato χ̑A*, the minimum value of χ̑ADattainable via column rescalings. Our framework is applicable to achieve the poly (n, m,log χ̑A*) bound using essentially any weakly polynomial LP algorithm, such as the ellipsoid method. At a technical level, our framework combines together approximate LP solutions to compute exact ones, making use of constructive proximity theorems-which bound the distance between solutions of “nearby” LPs-to keep the required accuracy low.

Following the breakthrough work of Tardos (Oper. Res. ’86) in the bit-complexity model, Vavasis and Ye (Math. Prog. ’96) gave the first exact algorithm for linear programming in the real model of computation with running time depending only on the constraint matrix. For solving a linear program (LP) max c x, Ax = b, x ≥ 0, A ∈ m × n , Vavasis and Ye developed a primal-dual interior point method using a ‘layered least squares’ (LLS) step, and showed that O(n 3.5 log(χ A +n)) iterations suffice to solve (LP) exactly, where χ A is a condition measure controlling the size of solutions to linear systems related to A.

We propose a new comprehensive solution to global interconnect optimization. Traditional buffering algorithms mostly insert repeaters on a net-by-net basis based on slacks and possibly guided by global wires. We show how to integrate routing congestion, placement congestion, global timing constraints, power consumption, and additional constraints into a single resource sharing formulation. The core of our algorithm is a new buffered routing subroutine. Given a net and Lagrangean resource prices for routing, timing, placement, and power, it computes a buffered global route. The resource sharing framework provides a special multiplicative price update for fast convergence. Our algorithm is fast enough for practical instances. We demonstrate experimentally on 7nm microprocessor units that it significantly improves timing while reducing netlength and power consumption in an industrial design flow.