Add zero-iteration early exit to the primal solvers, certified by the duality gap.

The primal cost has curvature of at least M in every zone, making it strongly
convex in the M-norm and bounding the suboptimality of any point by the
Fenchel duality gap at its constraint forces:

  cost(qacc) - cost* <= 0.5*grad'*M^-1*grad

Since M's factorization always exists, this certificate is evaluable before
the solver does any work: one triangular solve and one dot product. When the
warmstarted solution is already certified to satisfy the tolerance, CG and
Newton now return with zero iterations; for Newton this skips building and
factorizing the Hessian. If the certificate declines, Newton gets a second
exit after factorization: the Newton decrement, checked before the first
line search.

Because the gap bounds cost suboptimality, stiff constraints can convert it
into force errors of order sqrt(2*gap*stiffness). Newton solutions are
characteristically force-accurate, so Newton zero-iteration exits also
require the gradient criterion, preserving constraint-force accuracy at
rest; CG solutions are characteristically cost-accurate and exit on the gap
alone.

On a settling pile of 50 boxes (300 dofs, ~200 contacts), end-to-end time
per step drops 13% over a settle-then-rest run and 27% in the quiescent
limit, with Newton iterations falling from 0.98 to 0.40 per step.

Tests: WarmstartZeroIterations sweeps solver/cone/jacobian on a settled box,
asserting zero iterations, forward/inverse consistency, and agreement with a
tolerance=0 control solve from the same state. WarmstartZeroIterationsIslands
checks per-island exits with a kicked box next to a settled one.
RefsiteConservesMomentum now requests an exact solve (tolerance=0), since it
asserts momentum conservation tighter than the solver tolerance contract.
PiperOrigin-RevId: 947993735
Change-Id: I2fd855774bff619709b2c386f1ba2714286e0821
This commit is contained in:
Yuval Tassa
2026-07-14 17:23:26 -07:00
committed by Copybara-Service
parent 1e66efd114
commit c69ef03083
6 changed files with 211 additions and 23 deletions
+8
View File
@@ -1445,6 +1445,14 @@ representations of the constraint Jacobian and related matrices.
bootstraps the solver when constraints persist across time steps, but avoids carrying over stale forces from
constraints that have disappeared.
Because every zone of the piecewise-quadratic cost has curvature of at least :math:`M`, the cost is strongly convex
in the :math:`M`-norm, which bounds the suboptimality of any point by the duality gap at its constraint forces:
:math:`\text{cost}(a) - \text{cost}^* \le \tfrac{1}{2} g^T M^{-1} g`. Before starting iterations, the CG and Newton
solvers evaluate this certificate at the warmstarted point, using the already-computed factorization of
:math:`M`. If it is below tolerance, convergence is proven and the solver returns immediately with zero iterations;
in the Newton case this skips constructing and factorizing the Hessian. In a quiescent, well-warmstarted scene this
eliminates nearly the entire cost of the constraint solver.
.. _soIsland:
Constraint islands