We propose a decomposition framework for the parallel optimization of the sum of a differentiable (possibly nonconvex) function and a (block) separable nonsmooth, convex one. The latter term is usually employed to enforce structure in the solution, typically sparsity. Our framework is very flexible and includes both fully parallel Jacobi schemes and Gauss–Seidel (i.e., sequential) ones, as well as virtually all possibilities “in between” with only a subset of variables updated at each iteration. Our theoretical convergence results improve on existing ones, and numerical results on LASSO, logistic regression, and some nonconvex quadratic problems show that the new method consistently outperforms existing algorithms

Abstract. We consider the solution of generalized Nash equilibrium problems by concatenating the KKT optimality conditions of each player's optimization problem into a single KKT-like system. We then propose two approaches for solving this KKT system. The first approach is rather simple and uses a merit-function/equation-based technique for the solution of the KKT system. The second approach, partially motivated by the shortcomings of the first one, is an interior-point-based method. We show that this second approach has strong theoretical properties and, in particular, that it is possible to establish global convergence under sensible conditions, this probably being the first result of its kind in the literature. We discuss the results of an extensive numerical testing on four KKT-based solution algorithms, showing that the new interior-point method is efficient and very robust.

We propose to solve a general quasi-variational inequality by using its Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. To this end we use a globally convergent algorithm based on a potential reduction approach. We establish global convergence results for many interesting instances of quasi-variational inequalities, vastly broadening the class of problems that can be solved with theoretical guarantees. Our numerical testings are very promising and show the practical viability of the approach

We propose a decomposition framework for the parallel optimization of the sum of a differentiable function and a (block) separable nonsmooth, convex one. The latter term is typically used to enforce structure in the solution as, for example, in LASSO problems. Our framework is very flexible and includes both fully parallel Jacobi schemes and Gauss-Seidel (Southwell-type) ones, as well as virtually all possibilities in between (e.g., gradient- or Newton-type methods) with only a subset of variables updated at each iteration. Our theoretical convergence results improve on existing ones, and numerical results show that the new method compares favorably to existing algorithms

We consider generalized potential games, that constitute a fundamental subclass of generalized Nash equilibrium problems. We propose different methods to compute solutions of generalized potential games with mixedinteger variables, i.e., games in which some variable are continuous while the others are discrete. We investigate which types of equilibria of the game can be computed by minimizing a potential function over the common feasible set. In particular, for a wide class of generalized potential games, we characterize those equilibria that can be computed by minimizing potential functions as Pareto solutions of a particular multi-objective problem, and we show how different potential functions can be used to select equilibria. We propose a new Gauss-Southwell algorithm to compute approximate equilibria of any generalized potential game with mixed-integer variables. We show that this method converges in a finite number of steps and we also give an upper bound on this number of steps. Moreover, we make a thorough analysis on the behaviour of approximate equilibria with respect to exact ones. Finally, we make many numerical experiments to show the viability of the proposed approaches. Keywords Generalized Nash equilibrium problem • Generalized potential game • Mixed-integer nonlinear problem • Parametric optimization The work of the author has been partially supported by Avvio alla Ricerca 2015 Sapienza University of Rome, under grant 488.

We define the concept of reproducible map and show that, whenever the\ud constraint map defining the quasivariational inequality (QVI) is reproducible then one\ud can characterize the whole solution set of the QVI as a union of solution sets of some\ud variational inequalities (VI). By exploiting this property, we give sufficient conditions\ud to compute any solution of a generalized Nash equilibrium problem (GNEP) by solving\ud a suitable VI. Finally, we define the class of pseudo-Nash equilibrium problems, which\ud are (not necessarily convex) GNEPs whose solutions can be computed by solving\ud suitable Nash equilibrium problems

The Nash equilibrium problem is a widely used tool to model non-cooperative games. Many solution methods have been proposed in the literature to compute solutions of Nash equilibrium problems with continuous strategy sets, but, besides some specific methods for some particular applications, there are no general algorithms to compute solutions of Nash equilibrium problems in which the strategy set of each player is assumed to be discrete. We define a branching method to compute the whole solution set of Nash equilibrium problems with discrete strategy sets. This method is equipped with a procedure that, by fixing variables, effectively prunes the branches of the search tree. Furthermore, we propose a preliminary procedure that by shrinking the feasible set improves the performances of the branching method when tackling a particular class of problems. Moreover, we prove existence of equilibria and we propose an extremely fast Jacobi-type method which leads to one equilibrium for a new class of Nash equilibrium problems with discrete strategy sets. Our numerical results show that all proposed algorithms work very well in practice.

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