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This work analyzes the problem of traffic signs recognition in intelligent transport systems. The basic concepts of computer vision and image recognition tasks are considered. The most effective approach for solving the problem of analyzing and recognizing images now is the neural network method. Among all kinds of neural networks, the convolutional neural network has proven itself best. Activation functions such as Relu and SoftMax are used to solve the classification problem when recognizing traffic signs. This article proposes a technology for recognizing traffic signs. The choice of an approach for solving the problem based on a convolutional neural network due to the ability to effectively solve the problem of identifying essential features and classification. The initial data for the neural network model were prepared and a training sample was formed. The Google Colaboratory cloud service with the external libraries for deep learning TensorFlow and Keras was used as a platform for the intelligent system development. The convolutional part of the network is designed to highlight characteristic features in the image. The first layer includes 512 neurons with the Relu activation function. Then there is the Dropout layer, which is used to reduce the effect of overfitting the network. The output fully connected layer includes four neurons, which corresponds to the problem of recognizing four types of traffic signs. An intelligent traffic sign recognition system has been developed and tested. The used convolutional neural network included four stages of convolution and subsampling. Evaluation of the efficiency of the traffic sign recognition system using the three-block cross-validation method showed that the error of the neural network model is minimal, therefore, in most cases, new images will be recognized correctly. In addition, the model has no errors of the first kind, and the error of the second kind has a low value and only when the input image is very noisy.

In this paper we propose high-order (tensor) methods for two types of saddle point problems. Firstly, we consider the classic min-max saddle point problem. Secondly, we consider the search for a stationary point of the saddle point problem objective by its gradient norm minimization. Obviously, the stationary point does not always coincide with the optimal point. However, if we have a linear optimization problem with linear constraints, the algorithm for gradient norm minimization becomes useful. In this case we can reconstruct the solution of the optimization problem of a primal function from the solution of gradient norm minimization of dual function. In this paper we consider both types of problems with no constraints. Additionally, we assume that the objective function is $\mu$-strongly convex by the first argument, $\mu$-strongly concave by the second argument, and that the $p$-th derivative of the objective is Lipschitz-continous.

For min-max problems we propose two algorithms. Since we consider strongly convex a strongly concave problem, the first algorithm uses the existing tensor method for regular convex concave saddle point problems and accelerates it with the restarts technique. The complexity of such an algorithm is linear. If we additionally assume that our objective is first and second order Lipschitz, we can improve its performance even more. To do this, we can switch to another existing algorithm in its area of quadratic convergence. Thus, we get the second algorithm, which has a global linear convergence rate and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Finally, in convex optimization there exists a special methodology to solve gradient norm minimization problems by tensor methods. Its main idea is to use existing (near-)optimal algorithms inside a special framework. I want to emphasize that inside this framework we do not necessarily need the assumptions of strong convexity, because we can regularize the convex objective in a special way to make it strongly convex. In our article we transfer this framework on convex-concave objective functions and use it with our aforementioned algorithm with a global linear convergence and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Since the saddle point problem is a particular case of the monotone variation inequality problem, the proposed methods will also work in solving strongly monotone variational inequality problems.

The principle of minimal differentiation, based on the Hotelling model, is well known in the economy. It is applicable to horizontal differentiated goods of almost any nature. The Hotelling approach to modeling competition of oligopolies corresponds to a modern description of monopolistic competition with increasing returns to scale and imperfect competition. We develop a modification of the Hotelling model that endows a firm with a non-market advantage, which is introduced alike the valence advantage known in problems of political economy. The nonmarket (valence) advantage can be interpreted as advertisement (brand awareness of firms). Problem statement. Consider two firms competing with prices and location. Homogeneous consumers vary with its location on a segment. They minimize their costs, which additively includes the price of the product and the distance from them to the product. The utility function is linear with respect to the price and quadratic with respect to the distance. It is also expected that one of the firms (for certainty, firm № 1) has a market advantage d. The consumers are assumed to take into account the sum of the distance to the product and the market advantage of firm 1. Thus, the strategy of the firms and the consumers depend on two parameters: the unit t of the transport costs and the non-market advantage d. I explore characteristics of the equilibrium in the model as a function of the non-market advantage for different fixed t. The aim of the research is to assess the impact of the non-market advantage on the equlibrium. We prove that the Nash equilibrium exists and it is unique under additive consumers' preferences de-pending on the square of the distance between consumers and firms. This equilibrium is ‘richer’ than that in the original Hotelling model. In particular, non-market advantage can be excessive and inefficient to use.

The Lipschitz continuous property has been used for a long time to solve the global optimization problem and continues to be used. Here we can mention the work of Piyavskii, Yevtushenko, Strongin, Shubert, Sergeyev, Kvasov and others. Most papers assume a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz constant, but the derivation of this constant is a separate problem. Further still, we must prove that an objective function is really Lipschitz, and it is a complicated problem too. In the case where the Lipschitz continuity is established, Strongin proposed an algorithm for global optimization of a satisfying Lipschitz condition on a compact interval function without any a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz estimate. The algorithm not only finds a global extremum, but it determines the Lipschitz estimate too. It is known that every function that satisfies the Lipchitz condition on a compact convex set is uniformly continuous, but the reverse is not always true. However, there exist models (Arutyunova, Dulliev, Zabotin) whose study requires a minimization of the continuous but definitely not Lipschitz function. One of the algorithms for solving such a problem was proposed by R. J. Vanderbei. In his work he introduced some generalization of the Lipchitz property named $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz and proved that a function defined on a compact convex set is uniformly continuous if and only if it satisfies the $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz condition. The above-mentioned property allowed him to extend Piyavskii’s method. However, Vanderbei assumed that for a given value of $\varepsilon$ it is possible to obtain an associate Lipschitz $\varepsilon$-constant, which is a very difficult problem. Thus, there is a need to construct, for a function continuous on a compact convex domain, a global optimization algorithm which works in some way like Strongin’s algorithm, i.e., without any a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz $\varepsilon$-constant. In this paper we propose an extension of Strongin’s global optimization algorithm to a function continuous on a compact interval using the $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz conception, prove its convergence and solve some numerical examples using the software that implements the developed method.

In this article we consider min-min type of problems or minimization by two groups of variables. In some way it is similar to classic min-max saddle point problem. Although, saddle point problems are usually more difficult in some way. Min-min problems may occur in case if some groups of variables in convex optimization have different dimensions or if these groups have different domains. Such problem structure gives us an ability to split the main task to subproblems, and allows to tackle it with mixed oracles. However existing articles on this topic cover only zeroth and first order oracles, in our work we consider high-order tensor methods to solve inner problem and fast gradient method to solve outer problem.

We assume, that outer problem is constrained to some convex compact set, and for the inner problem we consider both unconstrained case and being constrained to some convex compact set. By definition, tensor methods use high-order derivatives, so the time per single iteration of the method depends a lot on the dimensionality of the problem it solves. Therefore, we suggest, that the dimension of the inner problem variable is not greater than 1000. Additionally, we need some specific assumptions to be able to use mixed oracles. Firstly, we assume, that the objective is convex in both groups of variables and its gradient by both variables is Lipschitz continuous. Secondly, we assume the inner problem is strongly convex and its gradient is Lipschitz continuous. Also, since we are going to use tensor methods for inner problem, we need it to be p-th order Lipschitz continuous ($p > 1$). Finally, we assume strong convexity of the outer problem to be able to use fast gradient method for strongly convex functions.

We need to emphasize, that we use superfast tensor method to tackle inner subproblem in unconstrained case. And when we solve inner problem on compact set, we use accelerated high-order composite proximal method.

Additionally, in the end of the article we compare the theoretical complexity of obtained methods with regular gradient method, which solves the mentioned problem as regular convex optimization problem and doesn’t take into account its structure (Remarks 1 and 2).

The work is devoted to the study of subgradient methods with different variations of the Polyak stepsize for minimization functions from the class of weakly convex and relatively weakly convex functions that have the corresponding analogue of a sharp minimum. It turns out that, under certain assumptions about the starting point, such an approach can make it possible to justify the convergence of the subgradient method with the speed of a geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the Polyak stepsize, a refined estimate for the rate of convergence is proved for minimization problems for weakly convex functions with a sharp minimum. The feature of this estimate is an additional consideration of the decrease of the distance from the current point of the method to the set of solutions with the increase in the number of iterations. The results of numerical experiments for the phase reconstruction problem (which is weakly convex and has a sharp minimum) are presented, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach to estimating the rate of convergence compared to the known one. Next, we propose a variation of the subgradient method with switching over productive and non-productive steps for weakly convex problems with inequality constraints and obtain the corresponding analog of the result on convergence with the rate of geometric progression. For the subgradient method with the corresponding variation of the Polyak stepsize on the class of relatively Lipschitz and relatively weakly convex functions with a relative analogue of a sharp minimum, it was obtained conditions that guarantee the convergence of such a subgradient method at the rate of a geometric progression. Finally, a theoretical result is obtained that describes the influence of the error of the information about the (sub)gradient available by the subgradient method and the objective function on the estimation of the quality of the obtained approximate solution. It is proved that for a sufficiently small error $\delta > 0$, one can guarantee that the accuracy of the solution is comparable to $\delta$.

This article presents an integrated dynamic model of eco-economic system of the Republic of Armenia (RA). This model is constructed using system dynamics methods, which allow to consider the major feedback related to key characteristics of eco-economic system. Such model is a two-objective optimization problem where as target functions the level of air pollution and gross profit of national economy are considered. The air pollution is minimized due to modernization of stationary and mobile sources of pollution at simultaneous maximization of gross profit of national economy. At the same time considered eco-economic system is characterized by the presence of internal constraints that must be accounted at acceptance of strategic decisions. As a result, we proposed a systematic approach that allows forming sustainable solutions for the development of the production sector of RA while minimizing the impact on the environment. With the proposed approach, in particular, we can form a plan for optimal enterprise modernization and predict long-term dynamics of harmful emissions into the atmosphere.

This paper is devoted to some variants of improving the convergence rate guarantees of the gradient-type algorithms for relatively smooth and relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems in the case of additional information about some analogues of the strong convexity of the objective function. We consider two classes of problems, namely, convex problems with a relative functional growth condition, and problems (generally, non-convex) with an analogue of the Polyak – Lojasiewicz gradient dominance condition with respect to Bregman divergence. For the first type of problems, we propose two restart schemes for the gradient type methods and justify theoretical estimates of the convergence of two algorithms with adaptively chosen parameters corresponding to the relative smoothness or Lipschitz property of the objective function. The first of these algorithms is simpler in terms of the stopping criterion from the iteration, but for this algorithm, the near-optimal computational guarantees are justified only on the class of relatively Lipschitz-continuous problems. The restart procedure of another algorithm, in its turn, allowed us to obtain more universal theoretical results. We proved a near-optimal estimate of the complexity on the class of convex relatively Lipschitz continuous problems with a functional growth condition. We also obtained linear convergence rate guarantees on the class of relatively smooth problems with a functional growth condition. For a class of problems with an analogue of the gradient dominance condition with respect to the Bregman divergence, estimates of the quality of the output solution were obtained using adaptively selected parameters. We also present the results of some computational experiments illustrating the performance of the methods for the second approach at the conclusion of the paper. As examples, we considered a linear inverse Poisson problem (minimizing the Kullback – Leibler divergence), its regularized version which allows guaranteeing a relative strong convexity of the objective function, as well as an example of a relatively smooth and relatively strongly convex problem. In particular, calculations show that a relatively strongly convex function may not satisfy the relative variant of the gradient dominance condition.

Modern power transportation systems are the complex engineering systems. Such systems include both point facilities (power producers, consumers, transformer substations, etc.) and the distributed elements (f.e. power lines). Such structures are presented in the form of the graphs with different types of nodes under creating the mathematical models. It is necessary to solve the system of partial differential equations of the hyperbolic type to study the dynamic effects in such systems.

An approach similar to one already applied in modeling similar problems earlier used in the work. New variant of the splitting method was used proposed by the authors. Unlike most known works, the splitting is not carried out according to physical processes (energy transport without dissipation, separately dissipative processes). We used splitting to the transport equations with the drain and the exchange between Reimann’s invariants. This splitting makes possible to construct the hybrid schemes for Riemann invariants with a high order of approximation and minimal dissipation error. An example of constructing such a hybrid differential scheme is described for a single-phase power line. The difference scheme proposed is based on the analysis of the properties of the schemes in the space of insufficient coefficients.

Examples of the model problem numerical solutions using the proposed splitting and the difference scheme are given. The results of the numerical calculations shows that the difference scheme allows to reproduce the arising regions of large gradients. It is shown that the difference schemes also allow detecting resonances in such the systems.

Distributed saddle point problems (SPPs) have numerous applications in optimization, matrix games and machine learning. For example, the training of generated adversarial networks is represented as a min-max optimization problem, and training regularized linear models can be reformulated as an SPP as well. This paper studies distributed nonsmooth SPPs with Lipschitz-continuous objective functions. The objective function is represented as a sum of several components that are distributed between groups of computational nodes. The nodes, or agents, exchange information through some communication network that may be centralized or decentralized. A centralized network has a universal information aggregator (a server, or master node) that directly communicates to each of the agents and therefore can coordinate the optimization process. In a decentralized network, all the nodes are equal, the server node is not present, and each agent only communicates to its immediate neighbors.

We assume that each of the nodes locally holds its objective and can compute its value at given points, i. e. has access to zero-order oracle. Zero-order information is used when the gradient of the function is costly, not possible to compute or when the function is not differentiable. For example, in reinforcement learning one needs to generate a trajectory to evaluate the current policy. This policy evaluation process can be interpreted as the computation of the function value. We propose an approach that uses a smoothing technique, i. e., applies a first-order method to the smoothed version of the initial function. It can be shown that the stochastic gradient of the smoothed function can be viewed as a random two-point gradient approximation of the initial function. Smoothing approaches have been studied for distributed zero-order minimization, and our paper generalizes the smoothing technique on SPPs.