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We study the problems of covering or partitioning a polygon $P$ (possibly with holes) using a minimum number of small pieces, where a small piece is a connected sub-polygon contained in an axis-aligned unit square. For covering, we seek to…
The graph matching optimization problem is an essential component for many tasks in computer vision, such as bringing two deformable objects in correspondence. Naturally, a wide range of applicable algorithms have been proposed in the last…
We give new results for problems in computational and statistical machine learning using tools from high-dimensional geometry and probability. We break up our treatment into two parts. In Part I, we focus on computational considerations in…
We consider the set multi-cover problem in geometric settings. Given a set of points P and a collection of geometric shapes (or sets) F, we wish to find a minimum cardinality subset of F such that each point p in P is covered by (contained…
In this thesis I discuss combinatorial optimization problems, from the statistical physics perspective. The starting point are the motivations which brought physicists together with computer scientists and mathematicians to work on this…
We consider a class of hypothesis testing problems where the null hypothesis postulates $M$ distributions for the observed data, and there is only one possible distribution under the alternative. We show that one can use a stochastic mirror…
The Szemer\'edi Regularity Lemma, in combination with the Blow-up Lemma, form the Regularity Method, a fundamental tool in graph embeddings, albeit restricted to very large and dense graphs. We propose an alternative vertex-partitioning…
Covering problems belong to the foundation of graph theory. There are several types of covering problems in graph theory such as covering the vertex set by stars (domination problem), covering the vertex set by cliques (clique covering…
We examine the \emph{submodular maximum coverage problem} (SMCP), which is related to a wide range of applications. We provide the first variational approximation for this problem based on the Nemhauser divergence, and show that it can be…
We present a fast and efficient method for studying vacuum stability constraints in multi-scalar theories beyond the Standard Model. This method is designed for a reliable use in large scale parameter scans. The minimization of the scalar…
We study the approximability of instances of the minimum entropy set cover problem, parameterized by the average frequency of a random element in the covering sets. We analyze an algorithm combining a greedy approach with another one biased…
We consider a spectrum of geometric optimization problems motivated by contexts such as satellite communication and astrophysics. In the problem Minimum Scan Cover with Angular Costs, we are given a graph $G$ that is embedded in Euclidean…
Spectral clustering is a celebrated algorithm that partitions objects based on pairwise similarity information. While this approach has been successfully applied to a variety of domains, it comes with limitations. The reason is that there…
Given a collection S of subsets of some set U, and M a subset of U, the set cover problem is to find the smallest subcollection C of S such that M is a subset of the union of the sets in C. While the general problem is NP-hard to solve,…
The Vertex Separator Problem (VSP) on a graph is the problem of finding the smallest collection of vertices whose removal separates the graph into two disjoint subsets of roughly equal size. Recently, Hager and Hungerford [1] developed a…
We propose a method for solving statistical mechanics problems defined on sparse graphs. It extracts a small Feedback Vertex Set (FVS) from the sparse graph, converting the sparse system to a much smaller system with many-body and dense…
In this paper we study the hard sphere packing problem in the Hamming space by the cavity method. We show that both the replica symmetric and the replica symmetry breaking approximations give maximum rates of packing that are asymptotically…
Stratified sampling is a fast and simple method to generate point sets with uniform distribution in hypercubes. However, for the most common paraxial stratfication it has the prominent drawback that the number of sampled points in n…
We give a nearly optimal sublinear-time algorithm for approximating the size of a minimum vertex cover in a graph G. The algorithm may query the degree deg(v) of any vertex v of its choice, and for each 1 <= i <= deg(v), it may ask for the…
In the 2-Vertex-Connected Spanning Subgraph problem (2-VCSS), we are given an undirected graph $G$, and the objective is to find a 2-vertex-connected spanning subgraph $S$ of $G$ with the minimum number of edges. In the context of…