Hidden Vertices in Extensions of Polytopes

Some widely known compact extended formulations have the property that each vertex of the corresponding extension polytope is projected onto a vertex of the target polytope. In this paper, we prove that for heptagons with vertices in general position none of the minimum size extensions has this property. Additionally, for any d >= 2 we construct a family of d-polytopes such that at least 1/9 of all vertices of any of their minimum size extensions is not projected onto vertices.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in: Operations Research Letter

Lifting Linear Extension Complexity Bounds to the Mixed-Integer Setting

Mixed-integer mathematical programs are among the most commonly used models for a wide set of problems in Operations Research and related fields. However, there is still very little known about what can be expressed by small mixed-integer programs. In particular, prior to this work, it was open whether some classical problems, like the minimum odd-cut problem, can be expressed by a compact mixed-integer program with few (even constantly many) integer variables. This is in stark contrast to linear formulations, where recent breakthroughs in the field of extended formulations have shown that many polytopes associated to classical combinatorial optimization problems do not even admit approximate extended formulations of sub-exponential size. We provide a general framework for lifting inapproximability results of extended formulations to the setting of mixed-integer extended formulations, and obtain almost tight lower bounds on the number of integer variables needed to describe a variety of classical combinatorial optimization problems. Among the implications we obtain, we show that any mixed-integer extended formulation of sub-exponential size for the matching polytope, cut polytope, traveling salesman polytope or dominant of the odd-cut polytope, needs $\Omega(n/\log n)$ many integer variables, where $n$ is the number of vertices of the underlying graph. Conversely, the above-mentioned polyhedra admit polynomial-size mixed-integer formulations with only $O(n)$ or $O(n \log n)$ (for the traveling salesman polytope) many integer variables. Our results build upon a new decomposition technique that, for any convex set $C$, allows for approximating any mixed-integer description of $C$ by the intersection of $C$ with the union of a small number of affine subspaces.Comment: A conference version of this paper will be presented at SODA 201

Extension complexities of Cartesian products involving a pyramid

It is an open question whether the linear extension complexity of the Cartesian product of two polytopes P, Q is the sum of the extension complexities of P and Q. We give an affirmative answer to this question for the case that one of the two polytopes is a pyramid.Comment: 5 page

Binary scalar products

Let $A,B \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$ both span $\mathbb{R}^d$ such that $\langle a, b \rangle \in \{0,1\}$ holds for all $a \in A$, $b \in B$. We show that $|A| \cdot |B| \le (d+1) 2^d$. This allows us to settle a conjecture by Bohn, Faenza, Fiorini, Fisikopoulos, Macchia, and Pashkovich (2015) concerning 2-level polytopes. Such polytopes have the property that for every facet-defining hyperplane $H$ there is a parallel hyperplane $H'$ such that $H \cup H'$ contain all vertices. The authors conjectured that for every $d$-dimensional 2-level polytope $P$ the product of the number of vertices of $P$ and the number of facets of $P$ is at most $d 2^{d+1}$, which we show to be true.Comment: 10 page