A "Decoupled" Quadratic Program

Someone posted a question on OR Stack Exchange about a problem with a "nonseparable bilinear objective function" with "decoupled constraints". The problem has the following form:

\begin{alignat*}{1} \min & \sum_{i=1}^{m}\sum_{j=1}^{n}a_{ij}x_{i}y_{j}+b^{\prime}x+c^{\prime}y\\ \textrm{s.t. } & x\in X\subset\mathbb{R}^{m}\\ & y\in Y\subset\mathbb{R}^{n} \end{alignat*}

where $X$ and $Y$ are polytopes (i.e., defined by linear constraints, and bounded) in the positive orthants of their respective spaces (i.e., $x\ge 0$ and $y\ge 0$) and $a$, $b$ and $c$ are all nonnegative. So besides everything being nonnegative, the key things here are that the objective contains bilinear terms (always involving the product of an $x$ and a $y$) and each constraint involves either only $x$ or only $y$. The author was looking for a way to exploit the separability of the constraints in solving the problem.

It occurred to me that a heuristic approach might be to solve a sequence of linear programs, alternating between $X$ and $Y$. Let $h(x,y)$ be the objective function of the original problem, and let $$f(x;y) = \sum_i\sum_j a_{ij}x_i y_j + b^\prime x$$and $$g(y;x)=\sum_i\sum_j a_{ij}x_i y_j + c^\prime y$$ be respectively the portions of the objective dependent on $x$ with $y$ fixed or dependent on $y$ with $x$ fixed. Each is linear in one set of variables (the other set being fixed). So we could proceed as follows:

1. Minimize $f(x;0)$ over $X$ (a linear program) to get a starting value $x^0\in X.$
2. Minimize $g(y;x^0)$ over $Y$ to get a starting value $y^0\in Y.$ We now have an incumbent solution with objective value $h(x^0,y^0)=b^\prime x^0 + g(y^0;x^0).$ Set $t=0$.
3. Repeat the following until the first time that the incumbent does not improve.
1. Minimize $f(x;y^t)$ over $X$ to get $x^{t+1}.$ If $f(x^{t+1},y^t) + c^\prime y^t$ is less than the incumbent value, make $(x^{t+1}, y^t)$ the new incumbent, else punt.
2. Minimize $g(y;x^{t+1})$ over $Y$ to get $y^{t+1}.$ If $g(y^{t+1};x^{t+1}) + b^\prime x^{t+1}$ is less than the incumbent value, make $(x^{t+1},y^{t+1})$ the new incumbent and increment $t$, else punt.

This will generate a sequence of solutions, each a corner point of the feasible region $X\times Y,$ with monotonically decreasing objective values.

Before continuing, it is worth noting that we are guaranteed that at least one corner of $X\times Y$ will be an optimum. This is of course always true when the objective is linear, but not always true with a quadratic objective. In our case, suppose that $(x^*, y^*)$ is an arbitrary optimum for the original problem. Then $x^*$ must minimize $f(x;y^*)$ over $X$, so either $x^*$ is a corner of $X$ of (if there are multiple optimal) $x^*$ can be replaced by a corner of $X$ with the same value of $f(x;y^*)$ (and thus the same value of $h(x;y^*)$, since the difference $c^\prime y^*$ does not depend on $x$). Apply the same logic on the other variable to show that $y*$ is either a corner of $Y$ or can be replaced by one.

I'm still calling this a heuristic, because there is one more piece to the puzzle. Could the procedure stop at a corner of $X\times Y$ that is a local but not global optimum? I'm not sure. Offhand, I do not see a way to prove that it will not, but I also cannot easily conjure up an example where it would.

To test this (and to confirm that I was not hallucinating, which has been known to happen), I wrote some Java code to generate random test problems and try the procedure. The code uses CPLEX to solve the LPs. In all test cases, it terminated with a solution (at least locally optimal) in a pretty small number of iterations. 

As a benchmark, I tried solving the full QP models with CPLEX, setting its "optimality target" parameter to "OPTIMALGLOBAL", which tells CPLEX to search for a global optimum to a nonconvex problem. This causes CPLEX to turn the problem into a mixed-integer quadratic program, which shockingly takes longer to solve than an LP. In a limited number of test runs, I observed a surprisingly consistent behavior. At the root node, CPLEX immediately found a feasible solution and then immediately found a better solution that matched what my procedure produced. After than (and within a usually stingy time limit I set), CPLEX made progress on the bound but never improved on the incumbent. In two test runs, CPLEX actually reached proven optimality with that second incumbent, meaning my procedure had found a global optimum.

So perhaps my "heuristic" can actually be shown to be an exact algorithm ... or perhaps not. At least in my test runs, CPLEX working on the QP found the best solution about as fast as, or maybe slightly faster than, my procedure did. On the other hand, my procedure only requires an LP solver, so it will work with code that does not accept QPs.

My Java code (which requires CPLEX) is available here.

Addendum: User "Dusto" on the Discord Operations Research server posted a simple counterexample to global convergence. The example has no constraints other than bounds on the variables (from 0 to 10 in all cases). The $b$ and $c$ vectors are strictly positive, so the linear programs in my heuristic will start at the origin and get stuck there. The $A$ matrix is crafted so that a negative overall objective value is attainable.