Related papers: Approximating the minimum length of synchronizing …
We prove that for an arbitrarily small constant $\eps>0,$ assuming NP$\not \subseteq$DTIME$(2^{{\log^{O(1/\eps)} n}})$, the preprocessing versions of the closest vector problem and the nearest codeword problem are hard to approximate within…
Piecewise testable languages are a subclass of the regular languages. There are many equivalent ways of defining them; Simon's congruence $\sim_k$ is one of the most classical approaches. Two words are $\sim_k$-equivalent if they have the…
Let $P:\{0,1\}^k \to \{0,1\}$ be a nontrivial $k$-ary predicate. Consider a random instance of the constraint satisfaction problem $\mathrm{CSP}(P)$ on $n$ variables with $\Delta n$ constraints, each being $P$ applied to $k$ randomly chosen…
We overcome two major bottlenecks in the study of low rank approximation by assuming the low rank factors themselves are sparse. Specifically, (1) for low rank approximation with spectral norm error, we show how to improve the best known…
We consider computing a longest palindrome in the streaming model, where the symbols arrive one-by-one and we do not have random access to the input. While computing the answer exactly using sublinear space is not possible in such a…
We study the complexity of approximating solution structure of the bijective weighted sentence alignment problem of DeNero and Klein (2008). In particular, we consider the complexity of finding an alignment that has a significant overlap…
The {\em asynchronous automaton} associated with a Boolean network $f:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^n$, considered in many applications, is the finite deterministic automaton where the set of states is $\{0,1\}^n$, the alphabet is $[n]$, and the…
A pattern $\alpha$ is a string of variables and terminal letters. We say that $\alpha$ matches a word $w$, consisting only of terminal letters, if $w$ can be obtained by replacing the variables of $\alpha$ by terminal words. The matching…
Constant workspace algorithms use a constant number of words in addition to the read-only input to the algorithm. In this paper, we devise algorithms to efficiently compute relative hulls in the plane using a constant workspace.…
We prove that unless P=NP, there exists no polynomial time (or even pseudo-polynomial time) algorithm that can test whether the optimal value of a nonlinear optimization problem where the objective and constraints are given by low-degree…
In order to prove that the P of problems is different to the NP class, we consider the satisfability problem of propositional calculus formulae, which is an NP-complete problem. It is shown that, for every search algorithm A, there is a set…
We present a near-linear time algorithm that approximates the edit distance between two strings within a polylogarithmic factor; specifically, for strings of length n and every fixed epsilon>0, it can compute a (log n)^O(1/epsilon)…
In Polyamorous Scheduling, we are given an edge-weighted graph and must find a periodic schedule of matchings in this graph which minimizes the maximal weighted waiting time between consecutive occurrences of the same edge. This NP-hard…
An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…
A cycle cover of a graph is a set of cycles such that every vertex is part of exactly one cycle. An L-cycle cover is a cycle cover in which the length of every cycle is in the set L. We investigate how well L-cycle covers of minimum weight…
Given a pair of strings, the problems of computing their Longest Common Subsequence and Edit Distance have been extensively studied for decades. For exact algorithms, LCS and Edit Distance (with character insertions and deletions) are…
We present an extremely simple polynomial-space exponential-time $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for MAX-k-SAT that is (slightly) faster than the previous known polynomial-space $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms by Hirsch…
The Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS) consists, for a set of strings S = {s_1,...,s_n}, in finding a minimum length string that contains all s_i, 1<= i <= n, as substrings. While a 2+11/30 approximation ratio algorithm has recently…
Simply put, a sparse polynomial is one whose zero coefficients are not explicitly stored. Such objects are ubiquitous in exact computing, and so naturally we would like to have efficient algorithms to handle them. However, with this compact…
It is well known that Sparse PCA (Sparse Principal Component Analysis) is NP-hard to solve exactly on worst-case instances. What is the complexity of solving Sparse PCA approximately? Our contributions include: 1) a simple and efficient…