Related papers: Exponential Inapproximability of Selecting a Maxim…

We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular set function subject to linear packing constraints. An instance of this problem consists of a matrix $A \in [0,1]^{m \times n}$, a vector $b \in [1,\infty)^m$, and a monotone…

Polynomial-time deterministic approximation of volumes of polytopes, up to an approximation factor that grows at most sub-exponentially with the dimension, remains an open problem. Recent work on this question has focused on identifying…

The NP-hard Metric Dimension problem is to decide for a given graph G and a positive integer k whether there is a vertex subset of size at most k that separates all vertex pairs in G. Herein, a vertex v separates a pair {u,w} if the…

For integers $k,n \geq 0$ and a cost vector $c \in Z^n$, we study two fundamental integer linear programming (ILP) problems: \[ \text{(Standard Form)} \quad \max\bigl\{c^\top x \colon Ax = b,\ x \in Z^n_{\geq 0}\bigr\} \text{ with } A \in…

We prove that the maximum determinant of an $n \times n $ matrix, with entries in $\{0,1\}$ and at most $n+k$ non-zero entries, is at most $2^{k/3}$, which is best possible when $k$ is a multiple of 3. This result solves a conjecture of…

We give a deterministic 2^{O(n)} algorithm for computing an M-ellipsoid of a convex body, matching a known lower bound. This has several interesting consequences including improved deterministic algorithms for volume estimation of convex…

The column number question asks for the maximal number of columns of an integer matrix with the property that all its rank size minors are bounded by a fixed parameter $\Delta$ in absolute value. Polynomial upper bounds have been proved in…

A matrix $M: A \times X \rightarrow \{-1,1\}$ corresponds to the following learning problem: An unknown element $x \in X$ is chosen uniformly at random. A learner tries to learn $x$ from a stream of samples, $(a_1, b_1), (a_2, b_2) \ldots$,…

The problem of extracting a well conditioned submatrix from any rectangular matrix (with normalized columns) has been studied for some time in functional and harmonic analysis; see…

Asadpour, Feige, and Saberi proved that the integrality gap of the configuration LP for the restricted max-min allocation problem is at most $4$. However, their proof does not give a polynomial-time approximation algorithm. A lot of efforts…

In this note, we establish the hardness of approximation of the problem of computing the minimal size of a $\delta$-sufficient reason for decision trees.

We prove that there is an absolute constant $ C$ such that for every $ n \geq 2 $ and $ N\geq 10^n, $ there exists a polytope $ P_{n,N} \subset \mathbb{R}^n $ with at most $ N $ facets that satisfies…

Given $n$ integer, let $X$ be either the set of hermitian or real $n\times n$ matrices of rank at least $n-1$. If $n$ is even, we give a sharp estimate on the maximal dimension of a real vector subspace of $X\cup\{0\}$. The rusults are…

Given a set of $n$ vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$, the goal of the \emph{determinant maximization} problem is to pick $k$ vectors with the maximum volume. Determinant maximization is the MAP-inference task for determinantal point processes (DPP)…

Let $D$ be the set of $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrices of trace equal to one, also known as the set of density matrices. We prove two results on the hardness of approximating $D$ with polytopes. First, we show that if $0 <…

Let $P$ be a polytope defined by the system $A x \leq b$, where $A \in R^{m \times n}$, $b \in R^m$, and $\text{rank}(A) = n$. We give a short geometric proof of the following tight upper bound on the number of vertices of $P$: $$ n! \cdot…

We study the problem of optimal subset selection from a set of correlated random variables. In particular, we consider the associated combinatorial optimization problem of maximizing the determinant of a symmetric positive definite matrix…

We study the Parallel Task Scheduling problem $Pm|size_j|C_{\max}$ with a constant number of machines. This problem is known to be strongly NP-complete for each $m \geq 5$, while it is solvable in pseudo-polynomial time for each $m \leq 3$.…

$ \newcommand{\SVP}{\textsf{SVP}} \newcommand{\CVP}{\textsf{CVP}} \newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} $We show a number of reductions between the Shortest Vector Problem and the Closest Vector Problem over lattices in different $\ell_p$ norms…

Sum-product networks (SPNs) are a class of probabilistic graphical models that allow tractable marginal inference. However, the maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference in SPNs is NP-hard. We investigate MAP inference in SPNs from both…