Solution Refinement at Regular Points of Conic Problems

Abstract: Most numerical methods for conic problems use the homogenous primal-dual embedding, which yields a primal-dual solution or a certificate establishing primal or dual infeasibility. Following Patrinos (and others, 2018), we express the embedding as the problem of finding a zero of a mapping containing a skew-symmetric linear function and projections onto cones and their duals. We focus on the special case when this mapping is regular, i.e., differentiable with nonsingular derivative matrix, at a solution point. While this is not always the case, it is a very common occurrence in practice. We propose a simple method that uses LSQR, a variant of conjugate gradients for least squares problems, and the derivative of the residual mapping to refine an approximate solution, i.e., to increase its accuracy. LSQR is a matrix-free method, i.e., requires only the evaluation of the derivative mapping and its adjoint, and so avoids forming or storing large matrices, which makes it efficient even for cone problems in which the data matrices are given and dense, and also allows the method to extend to cone programs in which the data are given as abstract linear operators. Numerical examples show that the method almost always improves an approximate solution of a conic program, and often dramatically, at a computational cost that is typically small compared to the cost of obtaining the original approximate solution. For completeness we describe methods for computing the derivative of the projection onto the cones commonly used in practice: nonnegative, second-order, semidefinite, and exponential cones. The paper is accompanied by an open source implementation.