On Geodesically Convex Formulations for the Brascamp-Lieb Constant

We consider two non-convex formulations for computing the optimal constant in the Brascamp-Lieb inequality corresponding to a given datum and show that they are geodesically log-concave on the manifold of positive definite matrices endowed with the Riemannian metric corresponding to the Hessian of the log-determinant function. The first formulation is present in the work of Lieb [Lieb, 1990] and the second is new and inspired by the work of Bennett et al. [Bennett et al., 2008]. Recent work of Garg et al. [Ankit Garg et al., 2017] also implies a geodesically log-concave formulation of the Brascamp-Lieb constant through a reduction to the operator scaling problem. However, the dimension of the arising optimization problem in their reduction depends exponentially on the number of bits needed to describe the Brascamp-Lieb datum. The formulations presented here have dimensions that are polynomial in the bit complexity of the input datum