Related papers: Integrality Gaps of Linear and Semi-definite Progr…
The Sum of Squares (\sos{}) hierarchy gives an automatized technique to create a family of increasingly tight convex relaxations for binary programs. There are several problems for which a constant number of rounds of this hierarchy give…
We introduce a method for proving Sum-of-Squares (SoS)/ Lasserre hierarchy lower bounds when the initial problem formulation exhibits a high degree of symmetry. Our main technical theorem allows us to reduce the study of the positive…
Recently, Cygan, Kowalik, and Wykurz [IPL 2009] gave sub-exponential-time approximation algorithms for the Set-Cover problem with approximation ratios better than ln(n). In light of this result, it is natural to ask whether such…
We study a semidefinite programming relaxation of the traveling salesman problem introduced by de Klerk, Pasechnik, and Sotirov [8] and show that their relaxation has an unbounded integrality gap. In particular, we give a family of…
Maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference is a fundamental computational paradigm for statistical inference. In the setting of graphical models, MAP inference entails solving a combinatorial optimization problem to find the most likely…
We close three open problems in the separation complexity of valid inequalities for the knapsack polytope. Specifically, we establish that the separation problems for extended cover inequalities, (1,k)-configuration inequalities, and weight…
There has been significant recent progress on algorithms for approximating graph spanners, i.e., algorithms which approximate the best spanner for a given input graph. Essentially all of these algorithms use the same basic LP relaxation, so…
We study integrality gap (IG) lower bounds on strong LP and SDP relaxations derived by the Sherali-Adams (SA), Lovasz-Schrijver-SDP (LS+), and Sherali-Adams-SDP (SA+) lift-and-project (L&P) systems for the t-Partial-Vertex-Cover (t-PVC)…
We present a general approach to rounding semidefinite programming relaxations obtained by the Sum-of-Squares method (Lasserre hierarchy). Our approach is based on using the connection between these relaxations and the Sum-of-Squares proof…
We consider the general polynomial optimization problem $P: f^*=\min \{f(x)\,:\,x\in K\}$ where $K$ is a compact basic semi-algebraic set. We first show that the standard Lagrangian relaxation yields a lower bound as close as desired to the…
We introduce a natural knapsack intersection hierarchy for strengthening linear programming relaxations of packing integer programs, i.e., $\max\{w^Tx:x\in P\cap\{0,1\}^n\}$ where $P=\{x\in[0,1]^n:Ax \leq b\}$ and $A,b,w\ge0$. The $t^{th}$…
A central problem in scheduling is to schedule $n$ unit size jobs with precedence constraints on $m$ identical machines so as to minimize the makespan. For $m=3$, it is not even known if the problem is NP-hard and this is one of the last…
In a classical problem in scheduling, one has $n$ unit size jobs with a precedence order and the goal is to find a schedule of those jobs on $m$ identical machines as to minimize the makespan. It is one of the remaining four open problems…
We present an accelerated relax-and-round algorithm for concave coverage problems, which generalize the classic maximum coverage problem. Building on the relax-and-round framework of Barman et al. [STACS 2021], we propose two significant…
In this paper, we present a new iterative rounding framework for many clustering problems. Using this, we obtain an $(\alpha_1 + \epsilon \leq 7.081 + \epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for $k$-median with outliers, greatly improving upon…
We study the ATSP (Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem), and our focus is on negative results in the framework of the Sherali-Adams (SA) Lift and Project method. Our main result pertains to the standard LP (linear programming) relaxation…
Partitioning the vertices of a graph into two roughly equal parts while minimizing the number of edges crossing the cut is a fundamental problem (called Balanced Separator) that arises in many settings. For this problem, and variants such…
The contention resolution framework is a versatile rounding technique used as a part of the relaxation and rounding approach for solving constrained submodular function maximization problems. We apply this framework to the hypergraph…
We consider the MAP-inference problem for graphical models, which is a valued constraint satisfaction problem defined on real numbers with a natural summation operation. We propose a family of relaxations (different from the famous…
The densest k-subgraph (DkS) problem (i.e. find a size k subgraph with maximum number of edges), is one of the notorious problems in approximation algorithms. There is a significant gap between known upper and lower bounds for DkS: the…