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The minimum constraint removal problem seeks to find the minimum number of constraints, i.e., obstacles, that need to be removed to connect a start to a goal location with a collision-free path. This problem is NP-hard and has been studied…
We study three fundamental three-dimensional (3D) geometric packing problems: 3D (Geometric) Bin Packing (3D-BP), 3D Strip Packing (3D-SP), and Minimum Volume Bounding Box (3D-MVBB), where given a set of 3D (rectangular) cuboids, the goal…
The closest string problem is an NP-hard problem, whose task is to find a string that minimizes maximum Hamming distance to a given set of strings. This can be reduced to an integer program (IP). However, to date, there exists no known…
We study algorithms for the Submodular Multiway Partition problem (SubMP). An instance of SubMP consists of a finite ground set $V$, a subset of $k$ elements $S = \{s_1,s_2,...,s_k\}$ called terminals, and a non-negative submodular set…
Given a set of discrete probability distributions, the minimum entropy coupling is the minimum entropy joint distribution that has the input distributions as its marginals. This has immediate relevance to tasks such as entropic causal…
The paper considers the NP-hard graph vertex coloring problem, which differs from traditional problems in which it is required to color vertices with a given (or minimal) number of colors so that adjacent vertices have different colors. In…
Block Sorting is a well studied problem, motivated by its applications in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Computational Biology. Block Sorting has been shown to be NP-Hard, and two separate polynomial time 2-approximation…
This paper is about minimum cost constrained selection of inputs and outputs for generic arbitrary pole placement. The input-output set is constrained in the sense that the set of states that each input can influence and the set of states…
Permutation Pattern Matching (or PPM) is a decision problem whose input is a pair of permutations $\pi$ and $\tau$, represented as sequences of integers, and the task is to determine whether $\tau$ contains a subsequence order-isomorphic to…
State minimization of combinatorial filters is a fundamental problem that arises, for example, in building cheap, resource-efficient robots. But exact minimization is known to be NP-hard. This paper conducts a more nuanced analysis of this…
Interdiction problems ask about the worst-case impact of a limited change to an underlying optimization problem. They are a natural way to measure the robustness of a system, or to identify its weakest spots. Interdiction problems have been…
Interdiction problems are leader-follower games in which the leader is allowed to delete a certain number of edges from the graph in order to maximally impede the follower, who is trying to solve an optimization problem on the impeded…
The problem of maximizing the $p$-th power of a $p$-norm over a halfspace-presented polytope in $\R^d$ is a convex maximization problem which plays a fundamental role in computational convexity. It has been shown in 1986 that this problem…
Discrete Morse theory has emerged as a powerful tool for a wide range of problems, including the computation of (persistent) homology. In this context, discrete Morse theory is used to reduce the problem of computing a topological invariant…
The purpose of this work is to introduce and characterize the Bounded Acceleration Shortest Path (BASP) problem, a generalization of the Shortest Path (SP) problem. This problem is associated to a graph: the nodes represent positions of a…
We study optimization problems that are neither approximable in polynomial time (at least with a constant factor) nor fixed parameter tractable, under widely believed complexity assumptions. Specifically, we focus on Maximum Independent…
We consider the \emph{smallest superpolyomino problem}: given a set of colored polyominoes, find the smallest polyomino containing each input polyomino as a subshape. This problem is shown to be NP-hard, even when restricted to a set of…
Time-varying coverage, namely sweep coverage is a recent development in the area of wireless sensor networks, where a small number of mobile sensors sweep or monitor comparatively large number of locations periodically. In this article we…
This paper presents a new combinatorial optimisation task, the Subset Sum Matching Problem (SSMP), which is an abstraction of common financial applications such as trades reconciliation. We present three algorithms, two suboptimal and one…
Binary embedding is the problem of mapping points from a high-dimensional space to a Hamming cube in lower dimension while preserving pairwise distances. An efficient way to accomplish this is to make use of fast embedding techniques…