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Dongdong Ge

Publications and source records attributed to Dongdong Ge.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

A Practical GPU-Enhanced Matrix-Free Primal-Dual Method for Large-Scale Conic Programs

In this paper, we introduce a practical GPU-enhanced matrix-free first-order method for solving large-scale conic programming problems, which we refer to as PDCS, standing for the Primal-Dual Conic Programming Solver. Problems that it solves include linear programs, second-order cone programs, convex quadratic programs, and exponential cone programs. The method avoids matrix factorizations and leverages sparse matrix-vector multiplication as its core computational operation, which is both memory-efficient and well-suited for GPU acceleration. The method builds on the restarted primal-dual hybrid gradient method but further incorporates several enhancements. Additionally, it employs a bisection-based method to compute projections onto rescaled cones. Furthermore, cuPDCS is a GPU implementation of PDCS and it implements customized computational schemes that utilize different levels of GPU architecture to handle cones of different types and sizes. Numerical experiments demonstrate that cuPDCS is generally more efficient than state-of-the-art commercial solvers and other first-order methods on large-scale conic program applications, including Fisher market equilibrium problems, Lasso regression, and multi-period portfolio optimization. Furthermore, cuPDCS also exhibits better scalability, efficiency, and robustness compared to other first-order methods on the conic program benchmark dataset CBLIB. These advantages are more pronounced in large-scale, lower-accuracy settings.

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Auto-Formulating Dynamic Programming Problems with Large Language Models

Dynamic programming (DP) is a fundamental method in operations research, but formulating DP models has traditionally required expert knowledge of both the problem context and DP techniques. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer the potential to automate this process. However, DP problems pose unique challenges due to their inherently stochastic transitions and the limited availability of training data. These factors make it difficult to directly apply existing LLM-based models or frameworks developed for other optimization problems, such as linear or integer programming. We introduce DP-Bench, the first benchmark covering a wide range of textbook-level DP problems to enable systematic evaluation. We present Dynamic Programming Language Model (DPLM), a 7B-parameter specialized model that achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art LLMs like OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, and surpasses them on hard problems. Central to DPLM's effectiveness is DualReflect, our novel synthetic data generation pipeline, designed to scale up training data from a limited set of initial examples. DualReflect combines forward generation for diversity and backward generation for reliability. Our results reveal a key insight: backward generation is favored in low-data regimes for its strong correctness guarantees, while forward generation, though lacking such guarantees, becomes increasingly valuable at scale for introducing diverse formulations. This trade-off highlights the complementary strengths of both approaches and the importance of combining them.

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A Technical Note on the Implementation and Use of PDCS

This technical note documents the implementation and use of the Primal-Dual Conic Programming Solver (PDCS), a first-order solver for large-scale conic optimization problems introduced by Lin et al. (arXiv:2505.00311). It describes the algorithmic and implementation details underlying PDCS, including the restarted primal-dual hybrid gradient method framework, adaptive step-size selection, adaptive reflected Halpern iterations, adaptive restarts, and diagonal preconditioning. It also provides practical instructions for using PDCS, including its interfaces with JuMP and CVXPY, solver options, and illustrative code examples. PDCS is available at https://github.com/ZikaiXiong/PDCS under the Apache License 2.0.

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FMIP: Joint Continuous-Integer Flow For Mixed-Integer Linear Programming

Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a foundational tool for complex decision-making problems. However, the NP-hard nature of MILP presents a significant computational challenge, motivating the development of machine learning-based heuristic solutions to accelerate downstream solvers. While recent generative models have shown promise in learning powerful heuristics, they suffer from a critical limitation. That is, they model the distribution of only the integer variables and fail to capture the intricate coupling between integer and continuous variables, creating an information bottleneck and ultimately leading to suboptimal solutions. To this end, we propose Joint Continuous-Integer Flow for Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (FMIP), which is the first generative framework that models the joint distribution of both integer and continuous variables for MILP solutions. Built upon the joint modeling paradigm, a holistic guidance mechanism is designed to steer the generative trajectory, actively refining solutions toward optimality and feasibility during the inference process. Extensive experiments on eight standard MILP benchmarks demonstrate the superior performance of FMIP against existing baselines, reducing the primal gap by 41.34% on average. Moreover, we show that FMIP is fully compatible with arbitrary backbone networks and various downstream solvers, making it well-suited for a broad range of real-world MILP applications.

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PDHCG-II: An Enhanced Version of PDHCG for Large-Scale Convex QP

Quadratic programming (QP) is a fundamental optimization model with wide-ranging applications in decision-making and machine learning, yet efficiently solving large-scale instances remains a major computational challenge. Building upon the recently developed PDHCG framework, we propose PDHCG-II, an enhanced first-order solver tailored for large-scale convex QPs. The proposed method explicitly exploits the quadratic structure of the objective and incorporates several key algorithmic innovations, including Halpern-type acceleration and a PID-controlled adaptive update of the primal-dual weight. To further improve practical performance, PDHCG-II introduces a refined adaptive termination criterion for inner subproblems to prevent over-solving, together with an infeasibility detection mechanism for robust handling of ill-posed instances. Extensive numerical experiments demonstrate that PDHCG-II consistently achieves 2.5-5 times speedups over PDHCG on standard QP benchmarks. To facilitate reproducibility and broader adoption, we release a CUDA-C implementation of PDHCG-II as open-source software.

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MoE-SpAc: Efficient MoE Inference Based on Speculative Activation Utility in Heterogeneous Edge Scenarios

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable scalable performance but face severe memory constraints on edge devices. Existing offloading strategies struggle with I/O bottlenecks due to the dynamic, low-information nature of autoregressive expert activation. In this paper, we propose to repurpose Speculative Decoding (SD) not merely as a compute accelerator, but as an informative lookahead sensor for memory management, supported by our theoretical and empirical analyses. Hence, we introduce MoE-SpAc, an MoE inference framework that integrates a Speculative Utility Estimator to track expert demand, a Heterogeneous Workload Balancer to dynamically partition computation via online integer optimization, and an Asynchronous Execution Engine to unify the prefetching and eviction in the same utility space. Extensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that MoE-SpAc achieves a 42% improvement in TPS over the SOTA SD-based baseline, and an average 4.04x speedup over all standard baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/lshAlgorithm/MoE-SpAc .

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Cardinal Optimizer (COPT) User Guide

Cardinal Optimizer is a high-performance mathematical programming solver for efficiently solving largescale optimization problem. This documentation provides basic introduction to the Cardinal Optimizer.

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Beyond Nonconvexity: A Universal Trust-Region Method with New Analyses

The trust-region (TR) method is renowned historically for its robustness in nonconvex problems and extraordinary numerical performance, but the study of its performance in convex optimization is somehow limited. This paper complements the existing literature by presenting a universal trust-region method that simultaneously incorporates the quadratic regularization and ball constraint. In particular, we introduce a novel descent property tailored for trust-region-type algorithms, enabling us to unify and streamline the analysis for both convex and nonconvex optimization. Our method exhibits an iteration complexity of $\tilde O(ε^{-3/2})$ to find an $ε$-approximate second-order stationary point for nonconvex optimization. Meanwhile, the analysis reveals that the universal method attains an $O(ε^{-1/2})$ complexity bound for convex optimization. Finally, we develop an adaptive universal method to address practical implementations. The numerical results show the effectiveness of our method in both nonconvex and convex problems.

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Solver-Informed RL: Grounding Large Language Models for Authentic Optimization Modeling

Optimization modeling is fundamental to decision-making across diverse domains. Despite progress in automating optimization formulation from natural language descriptions, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to generate formally correct and usable models against hallucinations, posing a challenge for reliable automation. Inspired by the success of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in enhancing Large Reasoning Models, we present Solver-Informed Reinforcement Learning (SIRL), a novel framework that significantly improves the authenticity of LLMs for optimization modeling using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward by leveraging external optimization solvers as verifiers. These verifiers automatically assess the executable code and the instance-level mathematical model represented by the associated LP file, yielding precise and comprehensive feedback signals -- including syntax, feasibility, and solution quality, serving as direct rewards for the RL process. This automated verification process, particularly from classic optimization solvers, also underpins our instance-enhanced self-consistency method to synthesize high-quality training data. Extensive experiments on diverse public benchmarks demonstrate that SIRL achieves state-of-the-art performance, substantially outperforming existing methods in generating accurate and executable optimization models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Cardinal-Operations/SIRL.

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OptPipe: Memory- and Scheduling-Optimized Pipeline Parallelism for LLM Training

Pipeline parallelism (PP) has become a standard technique for scaling large language model (LLM) training across multiple devices. However, despite recent progress in reducing memory consumption through activation offloading, existing approaches remain largely heuristic and coarse-grained, often overlooking the fine-grained trade-offs between memory, computation, and scheduling latency. In this work, we revisit the pipeline scheduling problem from a principled optimization perspective. We observe that prevailing strategies either rely on static rules or aggressively offload activations without fully leveraging the interaction between memory constraints and scheduling efficiency. To address this, we formulate scheduling as a constrained optimization problem that jointly accounts for memory capacity, activation reuse, and pipeline bubble minimization. Solving this model yields fine-grained schedules that reduce pipeline bubbles while adhering to strict memory budgets. Our approach complements existing offloading techniques: whereas prior approaches trade memory for time in a fixed pattern, we dynamically optimize the tradeoff with respect to model structure and hardware configuration. Experimental results demonstrate that our method consistently improves both throughput and memory utilization. In particular, we reduce idle pipeline time by up to 50% under the same per-device memory limit, and in some cases, enable the training of larger models within limited memory budgets.

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StepORLM: A Self-Evolving Framework With Generative Process Supervision For Operations Research Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising capabilities for solving Operations Research (OR) problems. While reinforcement learning serves as a powerful paradigm for LLM training on OR problems, existing works generally face two key limitations. First, outcome reward suffers from the credit assignment problem, where correct final answers can reinforce flawed reasoning. Second, conventional discriminative process supervision is myopic, failing to evaluate the interdependent steps of OR modeling holistically. To this end, we introduce StepORLM, a novel self-evolving framework with generative process supervision. At its core, StepORLM features a co-evolutionary loop where a policy model and a generative process reward model (GenPRM) iteratively improve on each other. This loop is driven by a dual-feedback mechanism: definitive, outcome-based verification from an external solver, and nuanced, holistic process evaluation from the GenPRM. The combined signal is used to align the policy via Weighted Direct Preference Optimization (W-DPO) and simultaneously refine the GenPRM. Our resulting 8B-parameter StepORLM establishes a new state-of-the-art across six benchmarks, significantly outperforming vastly larger generalist models, agentic methods, and specialized baselines. Moreover, the co-evolved GenPRM is able to act as a powerful and universally applicable process verifier, substantially boosting the inference scaling performance of both our own model and other existing LLMs.

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PDHCG: A Scalable First-Order Method for Large-Scale Competitive Market Equilibrium Computation

Large-scale competitive market equilibrium problems arise in a wide range of important applications, including economic decision-making and intelligent manufacturing. Traditional solution methods, such as interior-point algorithms and certain projection-based approaches, often fail to scale effectively to large problem instances. In this paper, we propose an efficient computational framework that integrates the primal-dual hybrid conjugate gradient (PDHCG) algorithm with GPU-based parallel computing to solve large-scale Fisher market equilibrium problems. By exploiting the underlying mathematical structure of the problem, we establish a theoretical guarantee of linear convergence for the proposed algorithm. Furthermore, the proposed framework can be extended to solve large-scale Arrow-Debreu market equilibrium problems through a fixed-point iteration scheme. Extensive numerical experiments conducted on GPU platforms demonstrate substantial improvements in computational efficiency, significantly expanding the practical solvable scale and applicability of market equilibrium models.

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BenLOC: A Benchmark for Learning to Configure MIP Optimizers

The automatic configuration of Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) optimizers has become increasingly critical as the large number of configurations can significantly affect solver performance. Yet the lack of standardized evaluation frameworks has led to data leakage and over-optimistic claims, as prior studies often rely on homogeneous datasets and inconsistent experimental setups. To promote a fair evaluation process, we present BenLOC, a comprehensive benchmark and open-source toolkit, which not only offers an end-to-end pipeline for learning instance-wise MIP optimizer configurations, but also standardizes dataset selection, train-test splits, feature engineering and baseline choice for unbiased and comprehensive evaluations. Leveraging this framework, we conduct an empirical analysis on five well-established MIP datasets and compare classical machine learning models with handcrafted features against state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques. The results demonstrate the importance of datasets, features and baseline criteria proposed by BenLOC and the effectiveness of BenLOC in providing unbiased and comprehensive evaluations.

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Data-driven Mixed Integer Optimization through Probabilistic Multi-variable Branching

In this paper, we propose a Pre-trained Mixed Integer Optimization framework (PreMIO) that accelerates online mixed integer program (MIP) solving with offline datasets and machine learning models. Our method is based on a data-driven multi-variable cardinality branching procedure that splits the MIP feasible region using hyperplanes chosen by the concentration inequalities. Unlike most previous ML+MIP approaches that either require complicated implementation or suffer from a lack of theoretical justification, our method is simple, flexible, provable, and explainable. Numerical experiments on both classical OR benchmark datasets and real-life instances validate the efficiency of our proposed method.

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ORLM: A Customizable Framework in Training Large Models for Automated Optimization Modeling

Optimization modeling plays a critical role in the application of Operations Research (OR) tools to address real-world problems, yet they pose challenges and require extensive expertise from OR experts. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), new opportunities have emerged to streamline and automate such task. However, current research predominantly relies on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4, along with extensive prompt engineering techniques. This reliance stems from the scarcity of high-quality training datasets for optimization modeling, resulting in elevated costs, prolonged processing times, and privacy concerns. To address these challenges, our work is the first to propose a viable path for training open-source LLMs that are capable of optimization modeling and developing solver codes, eventually leading to a superior ability for automating optimization modeling and solving. Particularly, we design the {\sc OR-Instruct}, a semi-automated data synthesis framework for optimization modeling that enables customizable enhancements for specific scenarios or model types. This work also introduces IndustryOR, the first industrial benchmark for evaluating LLMs in solving practical OR problems. We train several 7B-scale open-source LLMs using synthesized data (dubbed ORLMs{https://github.com/Cardinal-Operations/ORLM}), which exhibit significantly enhanced optimization modeling capabilities, achieving competitive performance across the NL4OPT, MAMO, and IndustryOR benchmarks. Additionally, our experiments highlight the potential of scaling law and reinforcement learning to further enhance the performance of ORLMs. The workflows and human-machine interaction paradigms of ORLMs in practical industrial applications are also discussed in the paper.

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Trust Region Methods For Nonconvex Stochastic Optimization Beyond Lipschitz Smoothness

In many important machine learning applications, the standard assumption of having a globally Lipschitz continuous gradient may fail to hold. This paper delves into a more general $(L_0, L_1)$-smoothness setting, which gains particular significance within the realms of deep neural networks and distributionally robust optimization (DRO). We demonstrate the significant advantage of trust region methods for stochastic nonconvex optimization under such generalized smoothness assumption. We show that first-order trust region methods can recover the normalized and clipped stochastic gradient as special cases and then provide a unified analysis to show their convergence to first-order stationary conditions. Motivated by the important application of DRO, we propose a generalized high-order smoothness condition, under which second-order trust region methods can achieve a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3.5})$ for convergence to second-order stationary points. By incorporating variance reduction, the second-order trust region method obtains an even better complexity of $\mathcal{O}(ε^{-3})$, matching the optimal bound for standard smooth optimization. To our best knowledge, this is the first work to show convergence beyond the first-order stationary condition for generalized smooth optimization. Preliminary experiments show that our proposed algorithms perform favorably compared with existing methods.

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Decoupling Learning and Decision-Making: Breaking the $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ Barrier in Online Resource Allocation with First-Order Methods

Online linear programming plays an important role in both revenue management and resource allocation, and recent research has focused on developing efficient first-order online learning algorithms. Despite the empirical success of first-order methods, they typically achieve a regret no better than $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$, which is suboptimal compared to the $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ bound guaranteed by the state-of-the-art linear programming (LP)-based online algorithms. This paper establishes several important facts about online linear programming, which unveils the challenge for first-order-method-based online algorithms to achieve beyond $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret. To address the challenge, we introduce a new algorithmic framework that decouples learning from decision-making. For the first time, we show that first-order methods can attain regret $\mathcal{O}(T^{1/3})$ with this new framework.

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Beyond $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{T})$ Regret: Decoupling Learning and Decision-making in Online Linear Programming

Online linear programming plays an important role in both revenue management and resource allocation, and recent research has focused on developing efficient first-order online learning algorithms. Despite the empirical success of first-order methods, they typically achieve a regret no better than $\mathcal{O} ( \sqrt{T} )$, which is suboptimal compared to the $\mathcal{O} (\log T)$ bound guaranteed by the state-of-the-art linear programming (LP)-based online algorithms. This paper establishes a general framework that improves upon the $\mathcal{O} ( \sqrt{T} )$ result when the LP dual problem exhibits certain error bound conditions. For the first time, we show that first-order learning algorithms achieve $o( \sqrt{T} )$ regret in the continuous support setting and $\mathcal{O} (\log T)$ regret in the finite support setting beyond the non-degeneracy assumption. Our results significantly improve the state-of-the-art regret results and provide new insights for sequential decision-making.

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