Franz Rendl

Michael Juenger, Elisabeth Lobe, Petra Mutzel et al.

Quantum annealing is getting increasing attention in combinatorial optimization. The quantum processing unit by D-Wave is constructed to approximately solve Ising models on so-called Chimera graphs. Ising models are equivalent to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problems and maximum cut problems on the associated graphs. We have tailored branch-and-cut as well as semidefinite programming algorithms for solving Ising models for Chimera graphs to provable optimality and use the strength of these approaches for comparing our solution values to those obtained on the current quantum annealing machine D-Wave 2000Q. This allows for the assessment of the quality of solutions produced by the D-Wave hardware. It has been a matter of discussion in the literature how well the D-Wave hardware performs at its native task, and our experiments shed some more light on this issue.

Barbara Kaltenbacher, Franz Rendl, Elena Resmerita

In this paper we present a method for the regularized solution of nonlinear inverse problems, based on Ivanov regularization (also called method of quasi solutions or constrained least squares regularization). This leads to the minimization of a non-convex cost function under a norm constraint, where non-convexity is caused by nonlinearity of the inverse problem. Minimization is done by iterative approximation, using (non-convex) quadratic Taylor expansions of the cost function. This leads to repeated solution of quadratic trust region subproblems with possibly indefinite Hessian. Thus the key step of the method consists in application of an efficient method for solving such quadratic subproblems, developed by Rendl and Wolkowicz [10]. We here present a convergence analysis of the overall method as well as numerical experiments.