Related papers: Parikh Images of Regular Languages: Complexity and…

We revisit a standard polygon containment problem: given a convex $k$-gon $P$ and a convex $n$-gon $Q$ in the plane, find a placement of $P$ inside $Q$ under translation and rotation (if it exists), or more generally, find the largest copy…

Let $P$ be a set of $n$ points in $\R^d$. We present a linear-size data structure for answering range queries on $P$ with constant-complexity semialgebraic sets as ranges, in time close to $O(n^{1-1/d})$. It essentially matches the…

By Fagin's Theorem, NP contains precisely those problems that can be described by formulas starting with an existential second-order quantifier, followed by only first-order quantifiers (ESO formulas). Subsequent research refined this…

We consider two natural problems about nondeterministic finite automata. First, given such an automaton M of n states, and a length l, does M accept a word of length l? We show that the classic problem of triangle-free graph recognition…

Let $G$ be a directed graph on $n$ vertices. Given an integer $k<=n$, the SIMPLE $k$-PATH problem asks whether there exists a simple $k$-path in $G$. In case $G$ is weighted, the MIN-WT SIMPLE $k$-PATH problem asks for a simple $k$-path in…

We use results from communication complexity, both new and old ones, to prove lower bounds for unambiguous finite automata (UFAs). We show three results. $\textit{Complement:}$ There is a language $L$ recognised by an $n$-state UFA such…

Let $A$ be a matrix with nonnegative real entries. A nonnegative factorization of size $k$ is a representation of $A$ as a sum of $k$ nonnegative rank-one matrices. The space of all such factorizations is a bounded semialgebraic set, and we…

This paper investigates complexity of the uniform membership problem for hyperedge replacement grammars in comparison with other mildly context-sensitive grammar formalisms. It turns out that the complexity of this problem depends on how…

We consider a bi-criteria generalization of the pathwidth problem, where, for given integers $k,l$ and a graph $G$, we ask whether there exists a path decomposition $\cP$ of $G$ such that the width of $\cP$ is at most $k$ and the number of…

Kunchenko's method of polynomial maximization provides a semiparametric apparatus for parameter estimation under non-Gaussian errors, but its classical power basis relies on finite higher-order integer moments. This paper introduces the…

Given a quadratic map Q : K^n -> K^k defined over a computable subring D of a real closed field K, and a polynomial p(Y_1,...,Y_k) of degree d, we consider the zero set Z=Z(p(Q(X)),K^n) of the polynomial p(Q(X_1,...,X_n)). We present a…

Motivated by problems of uncertainty propagation and robust estimation we are interested in computing a polynomial sublevel set of fixed degree and minimum volume that contains a given semialgebraic set K. At this level of generality this…

For every algebraically closed field $\boldsymbol k$ of characteristic different from $2$, we prove the following: (1) Generic finite dimensional (not necessarily associative) $\boldsymbol k$-algebras of a fixed dimension, considered up to…

New bounds on the number of similar or directly similar copies of a pattern within a finite subset of the line or the plane are proved. The number of equilateral triangles whose vertices all lie within an $n$-point subset of the plane is…

The Frankl conjecture, also known as the union-closed sets conjecture, states that in any finite non-empty union-closed family, there exists an element in at least half of the sets. Let $f(n,a)$ be the maximum number of sets in a…

Many graph problems were first shown to be fixed-parameter tractable using the results of Robertson and Seymour on graph minors. We show that the combination of finite, computable, obstruction sets and efficient order tests is not just one…

We study the problem of deciding whether a given language is directed. A language $L$ is \emph{directed} if every pair of words in $L$ have a common (scattered) superword in $L$. Deciding directedness is a fundamental problem in connection…

We introduce a restricted second-order logic $\mathrm{SO}^{\mathit{plog}}$ for finite structures where second-order quantification ranges over relations of size at most poly-logarithmic in the size of the structure. We demonstrate the…

We consider variations on the following problem: given an NFA M and a pattern p, does there exist an x in L(M) such that p matches x? We consider the restricted problem where M only accepts a finite language. We also consider the variation…

A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \dots w[i_{k}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \lvert w\rvert$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every…