A Multiscale Primal-Dual Interior-Point Relaxation Method for Large-Scale Optimal Transport Problems

Abstract

Large-scale optimal transport (OT) problems involve a vast number of transport variables, leading to prohibitive memory and computational costs. To address these challenges, we propose a multiscale primal-dual interior-point relaxation method (MSIPRM). The multiscale outer framework constructs a hierarchy of standard OT problems at progressively finer levels. At each level, the OT problem is solved over a sequence of adaptively refined active sets initialized based on the solution support at the previous level. This yields a sequence of closely related sparse subproblems, thereby substantially reducing memory requirements. The primal-dual interior-point relaxation method (IPRM) serves as the inner solver for each sparse subproblem. Since IPRM does not require strictly interior iterates, it can readily use the solution of the previous subproblem as a warm start. To efficiently obtain the Newton direction, we solve a reduced Schur complement system derived from the normal equations. Furthermore, we develop an effective support-identification strategy based on the approximate solutions obtained by IPRM. We establish condition number estimates for the Schur complement matrices and analyze the global and local convergence properties of the algorithm. Numerical experiments on large-scale test problems demonstrate the computational efficiency and scalability of MSIPRM and show that it compares favorably with existing solvers. In particular, MSIPRM can handle instances whose full formulations contain trillions of transport variables.