On Geodesically Convex Formulations for the Brascamp-Lieb Constant

Abstract

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 and the second is inspired by the work of Bennett et al. Recent works of Garg et al.and Allen-Zhu et al. also imply 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.