Optimal Diagonal Preconditioning Beyond Worst-Case Conditioning: Theory and Practice of Omega Scaling

ArXi:2509.23439v2 Announce Type: replace-cross We study optimal diagonal preconditioning using the classical worst-case $\kappa$-condition number and the averaging-based $\omega$-condition number. For the $\kappa$-optimal preconditioning problem, we derive an affine-based pseudoconvex reformulation with three key advantages: all stationary points are global minima, subgradients are inexpensive to compute, and the optimization variable is an $n$-dimensional vector rather than an $n\times n$ matrix as in semidefinite programming (SDP) approaches.