$(\text{DNN})^2$: Doubly Non-Negative Relaxations for Deep Neural Networks

Existing linear program (LP) and semidefinite program (SDP) relaxations for rectified linear unit (ReLU) neural network (NN) verification yield overly-conservative safety guarantees due to significant relaxation gaps. While the completely positive program (CPP) formulation closes this gap, it is NP-hard to solve. Its cheapest tractable relaxation, the doubly non-negative program (DNN), retains critical constraints as an SDP, but one whose size exceeds the reach of interior-point methods at practical scale. While Burer-Monteiro (BM) factorization has been applied to make SDP-based verification scalable, no such result exists for the strictly tighter DNN formulation. A key obstacle is that additional non-negativity constraints in the DNN cause dual multipliers for optimality certification to be non-unique, making standard certification methods inapplicable. We propose a novel eigenvalue maximization procedure that searches the non-unique multiplier space for a valid certificate, i.e. a global optimality guarantee. Experiments demonstrate that our approach $(\text{DNN})^2$ produces bounds consistently tighter than the standard SDP method, often matching the exact solution, and that our certification procedure confirms global optimality when a valid certificate exists. These results are a key step toward providing tight, certifiable, and computationally scalable verification guarantees needed to deploy neural network controllers and perception modules in safety-critical autonomous systems.

Spectral Concentration and Recovery in Sparse High-Dimensional Random Geometric Graphs

We study sparse threshold random geometric graphs generated by high-dimensional spherical or Gaussian latent vectors. Although each edge has marginal probability $p$, shared latent variables make the adjacency entries dependent. At the connectivity scale $np=Ω(\log n)$, the spherical adjacency matrix satisfies, with high probability,$\|A-\mathbb E A\|_{\mathrm{op}}=O\left(\sqrt{np\log n}+npτ\right)$, where $τ$ is the cap threshold; an analogous estimate holds for Gaussian vectors after controlling radial fluctuations. This sharpens the spectral bound in Liu, Mohanty, Schramm, and Yang (2023) under weaker assumptions and strengthens the global-synchronization guarantee of Abdalla, Bandeira, and Invernizzi (2024) for the homogeneous Kuramoto model. The leading eigenspace also estimates the latent geometry. When $np\gg\log n$, vector and relative Gram-matrix errors vanish for$\log(1/p)\ll d\ll np\log(1/p)/\log n$ in the spherical model and $\log^2(1/p)\log n\ll d\ll np\log(1/p)/\log n$ in the Gaussian model, improving the recovery conditions of Li and Schramm (2023). For the Gaussian mixture block model introduced there, a polynomial-time semidefinite program gives, to our knowledge, the first exact-recovery guarantee at the connectivity scale in a moderate-separation regime. At much larger separation, fixed edge density creates isolated vertices and makes exact recovery impossible. Our reusable decoupling and matrix concentration framework avoids trace-moment methods and applies broadly to random graph models with latent vectors.

Scalable Deep Unfolding of Conic Optimizers

Deep unfolding (DU) accelerates iterative optimizers by introducing learnable components and training them through unrolled iterations, but extending DU to the large-scale semidefinite programs (SDPs) common in robotics has remained limited. Unrolling a full-update conic solver such as COSMO exposes two obstacles that prior work on learned conic solvers has not: backpropagating through the per-iteration linear-system solve incurs memory quadratic in the problem size once the coefficient matrix is formed explicitly, and backpropagating through the positive semidefinite (PSD) cone projection becomes numerically unstable when eigenvalues coincide. We address the first obstacle with a matrix-free implicit differentiation rule that operates entirely through matrix-vector products, reducing memory from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$ and enabling backpropagation at scales where direct factorization runs out of memory. We address the second with a backward rule based on the Dalečkii--Krein representation of the Fréchet derivative, which remains well-defined under repeated eigenvalues. Together these make it possible to learn lightweight hyperparameter policies and warm-starts for a full-update conic solver. We evaluate on nonlinear covariance steering problems solved via sequential convex programming (SCP), as well as standalone SDPs and second-order cone programs ranging from max-cut and Lovász $\vartheta$ SDPs to robust estimation and control problems. The learned policies outperform state-of-the-art solvers across all problems, and can provide up to a 50$\times$ speedup depending on the class. When used as a subroutine in SCP, the learned approach delivers over a 30$\times$ speedup compared to COSMO.

On the Expressive Power of GNNs to Solve Linear SDPs

Semidefinite programs (SDPs) are a powerful framework for convex optimization and for constructing strong relaxations of hard combinatorial problems. However, solving large SDPs can be computationally expensive, motivating the use of machine learning models as fast computational surrogates. Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a natural candidate in this setting due to their sparsity-awareness and ability to model variable-constraint interactions. In this work, we study what expressive power is sufficient to recover optimal SDP solutions. We first prove negative results showing that standard GNN architectures fail on recovering linear SDP solutions. We then identify a more expressive architecture that captures the key structure of SDPs and can, in particular, emulate the updates of a standard first-order solver. Empirically, on both synthetic and \textsc{SdpLib} benchmarks of various classes of SDPs, this more expressive architecture achieves consistently lower prediction error and objective gap than theoretically weaker baselines. Finally, using the learned high-quality predictions to warm-start the first-order solver yields practical speedups of up to 80%.