Related papers: Improved Approximations for Guarding 1.5-Dimension…
We introduce and study the problem of planning a trajectory for an agent to carry out a scouting mission while avoiding being detected by an adversarial guard. This introduces an adversarial version of classical visibility-based planning…
In this paper we give a f-approximation algorithm for the minimum unweighted Vertex Cover problem with Hard Capacity constraints (VCHC) on f-hypergraphs. This problem generalizes standard vertex cover for which the best known approximation…
First, we study geometric variants of the standard set cover motivated by assignment of directional antenna and shipping with deadlines, providing the first known polynomial-time exact solutions. Next, we consider the following general…
We explore the problem of $M$-guarding polygons with holes using $k$-visibility guards, where a set of guards is said to $M$-guard a polygon if every point in the polygon is visible to at least $M$ guards, with the constraint that there may…
The Restricted Assignment Problem is a prominent special case of Scheduling on Parallel Unrelated Machines. For the strongest known linear programming relaxation, the configuration LP, we improve the non-constructive bound on its…
We consider the problem of reconstructing a low rank matrix from a subset of its entries and analyze two variants of the so-called Alternating Minimization algorithm, which has been proposed in the past. We establish that when the…
In the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP) the goal is to augment a tree $T$ by a minimum size edge set $F$ from a given edge set $E$ such that $T \cup F$ is $2$-edge-connected. The best approximation ratio known for TAP is $1.5$. In the more…
We consider the problem of approximating a given matrix by a low-rank matrix so as to minimize the entrywise $\ell_p$-approximation error, for any $p \geq 1$; the case $p = 2$ is the classical SVD problem. We obtain the first provably good…
In the Shortest Superstring problem, we are given a set of strings and we are asking for a common superstring, which has the minimum number of characters. The Shortest Superstring problem is NP-hard and several constant-factor approximation…
We study fair division of indivisible goods under the maximin share (MMS) fairness criterion in settings where agents are grouped into a small number of types, with agents within each type having identical valuations. For the special case…
We propose a new algorithm to approximate the Earth Mover's distance (EMD). Our main idea is motivated by the theory of optimal transport, in which EMD can be reformulated as a familiar $L_1$ type minimization. We use a regularization which…
Geometric optimisation algorithms are developed that efficiently find the nearest low-rank correlation matrix. We show, in numerical tests, that our methods compare favourably to the existing methods in the literature. The connection with…
The Searchlight Scheduling Problem was first studied in 2D polygons, where the goal is for point guards in fixed positions to rotate searchlights to catch an evasive intruder. Here the problem is extended to 3D polyhedra, with the guards…
The Capacitated Location Routing Problem is an important planning and routing problem in logistics, which generalizes the capacitated vehicle routing problem and the uncapacitated facility location problem. In this problem, we are given a…
Approximate linear programming (ALP) is an efficient approach to solving large factored Markov decision processes (MDPs). The main idea of the method is to approximate the optimal value function by a set of basis functions and optimize…
We present a simple 4-approximation algorithm for computing a maximum agreement forest of multiple unrooted binary trees. This algorithm applies LP rounding to an extension of a recent ILP formulation of the maximum agreement forest problem…
A 2.75-approximation algorithm is proposed for the unconstrained traveling tournament problem, which is a variant of the traveling tournament problem. For the unconstrained traveling tournament problem, this is the first proposal of an…
We develop fixed-point algorithms for the approximation of structured matrices with rank penalties. In particular we use these fixed-point algorithms for making approximations by sums of exponentials, or frequency estimation. For the basic…
Matrix completion is a well-studied problem with many machine learning applications. In practice, the problem is often solved by non-convex optimization algorithms. However, the current theoretical analysis for non-convex algorithms relies…
Least squares approximation is a technique to find an approximate solution to a system of linear equations that has no exact solution. In a typical setting, one lets $n$ be the number of constraints and $d$ be the number of variables, with…