Related papers: On constant factor approximation for earth mover d…
In recent years, considerable advances have been made in the study of properties of metric spaces in terms of their doubling dimension. This line of research has not only enhanced our understanding of finite metrics, but has also resulted…
In the first part of the paper, we present an (1+\mu)-approximation algorithm to the minimum-spanning tree of points in a planar arrangement of lines, where the metric is the number of crossings between the spanning tree and the lines. The…
In this work, we develop methods for few-shot image classification from a new perspective of optimal matching between image regions. We employ the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) as a metric to compute a structural distance between dense image…
Edit distance is a measure of similarity of two strings based on the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. The edit distance can be computed exactly using a…
We study the least doubling constant $C_{(X,d)}$, among all doubling measures $\mu$ supported on a metric space $(X,d)$. In particular, we prove that for every metric space with more than one point, $C_{(X,d)}\ge 2$. We also describe some…
A distributed network is modeled by a graph having $n$ nodes (processors) and diameter $D$. We study the time complexity of approximating {\em weighted} (undirected) shortest paths on distributed networks with a $O(\log n)$ {\em bandwidth…
Approximating distributions from their samples is a canonical statistical-learning problem. One of its most powerful and successful modalities approximates every distribution to an $\ell_1$ distance essentially at most a constant times…
This paper presents a near-optimal distributed approximation algorithm for the minimum-weight connected dominating set (MCDS) problem. The presented algorithm finds an $O(\log n)$ approximation in $\tilde{O}(D+\sqrt{n})$ rounds, where $D$…
In this short paper, we present an improved algorithm for approximating the minimum cut on distributed (CONGEST) networks. Let $\lambda$ be the minimum cut. Our algorithm can compute $\lambda$ exactly in…
Efficient computation of the optimal transport distance between two distributions serves as an algorithm subroutine that empowers various applications. This paper develops a scalable first-order optimization-based method that computes…
The edit distance of two strings is the minimum number of insertions, deletions, and substitutions of characters needed to transform one string into the other. The textbook dynamic-programming algorithm computes the edit distance of two…
Optimal mass transport, also known as the earth mover's problem, is an optimization problem with important applications in various disciplines, including economics, probability theory, fluid dynamics, cosmology and geophysics to cite a few.…
Metric embeddings are a widely used method in algorithm design, where generally a ``complex'' metric is embedded into a simpler, lower-dimensional one. Historically, the theoretical computer science community has focused on bi-Lipschitz…
Given an $n$-point metric space $(\mathcal{X},d)$ where each point belongs to one of $m=O(1)$ different categories or groups and a set of integers $k_1, \ldots, k_m$, the fair Max-Min diversification problem is to select $k_i$ points…
In this paper, we study the problem of approximating the minimum cut in a distributed message-passing model, the CONGEST model. The minimum cut problem has been well-studied in the context of centralized algorithms. However, there were no…
We consider the problem of matching a metric space $(X,d_X)$ of size $k$ with a subspace of a metric space $(Y,d_Y)$ of size $n \geq k$, assuming that these two spaces have constant doubling dimension $\delta$. More precisely, given an…
We consider the problem of augmenting an $n$-vertex tree with one shortcut in order to minimize the diameter of the resulting graph. The tree is embedded in an unknown space and we have access to an oracle that, when queried on a pair of…
The earth mover's distance (EMD), also known as the 1-Wasserstein metric, measures the minimum amount of work required to transform one probability distribution into another. The EMD can be naturally generalized to measure the "distance"…
We study fundamental graph parameters such as the Diameter and Radius in directed graphs, when distances are measured using a somewhat unorthodox but natural measure: the distance between $u$ and $v$ is the minimum of the shortest path…
Finding nonoverlapping balls with given centers in any metric space, maximizing the sum of radii of the balls, can be expressed as a linear program. Its dual linear program expresses the problem of finding a minimum-weight set of cycles…