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We design a new LP-based algorithm for the graphic $s$-$t$ path Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), which achieves the best approximation factor of 1.5. The algorithm is based on the idea of narrow cuts due to An, Kleinberg, and Shmoys. It…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2013-04-29 Zhihan Gao

Policy optimization is among the most popular and successful reinforcement learning algorithms, and there is increasing interest in understanding its theoretical guarantees. In this work, we initiate the study of policy optimization for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Liyu Chen , Haipeng Luo , Aviv Rosenberg

The path version of the Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the most well-studied variants of the ubiquitous TSP. Its generalization, the Multi-Path TSP, has recently been used in the best known algorithm for path TSP by Traub and Vygen…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Morteza Alimi , Niklas Dahlmeier , Tobias Mömke , Philipp Pabst , Laura Vargas Koch

Prize-Collecting TSP is a variant of the traveling salesperson problem where one may drop vertices from the tour at the cost of vertex-dependent penalties. The quality of a solution is then measured by adding the length of the tour and the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Jannis Blauth , Nathan Klein , Martin Nägele

We develop faster approximation algorithms for Metric-TSP building on recent, nearly linear time approximation schemes for the LP relaxation [Chekuri and Quanrud, 2017]. We show that the LP solution can be sparsified via cut-sparsification…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-02-06 Chandra Chekuri , Kent Quanrud

The paper revisits the robust $s$-$t$ path problem, one of the most fundamental problems in robust optimization. In the problem, we are given a directed graph with $n$ vertices and $k$ distinct cost functions (scenarios) defined over edges,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Shi Li , Chenyang Xu , Ruilong Zhang

Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) is one of the unsolved problems in computer science. TSP is NP Hard. Till now the best approximation ratio found for symmetric TSP is three by two by Christofides Algorithm more than forty years ago. There…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-04-27 Alok Chauhan , Madhusudan Verma

We study the structure of solutions to linear programming formulations for the traveling salesperson problem (TSP). We perform a detailed analysis of the support of the subtour elimination linear programming relaxation, which leads to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-03-27 Matthias Mnich , Tobias Mömke

We give an improved analysis of the best-of-many Christofides algorithm with lonely edge deletion, which was proposed by Seb\H{o} and van Zuylen [2016]. This implies an improved upper bound on the integrality ratio of the standard LP…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2019-07-24 Vera Traub , Jens Vygen

We study the following two maximization problems related to spanning trees in the Euclidean plane. It is not known whether or not these problems are NP-hard. We present approximation algorithms with better approximation ratios for both…

Computational Geometry · Computer Science 2020-10-09 Ahmad Biniaz

The Steiner tree problem is one of the classic and most fundamental $\mathcal{NP}$-hard problems: given an arbitrary weighted graph, seek a minimum-cost tree spanning a given subset of the vertices (terminals). Byrka \emph{et al}. proposed…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2018-11-02 Chi-Yeh Chen

We generalize the tree doubling and Christofides algorithm, the two most common approximations for TSP, to parameterized approximations for ATSP. The parameters we consider for the respective parameterizations are upper bounded by the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-27 Lukas Behrendt , Katrin Casel , Tobias Friedrich , J. A. Gregor Lagodzinski , Alexander Löser , Marcus Wilhelm

We present a new approach for gluing tours over certain tight, 3-edge cuts. Gluing over 3-edge cuts has been used in algorithms for finding Hamilton cycles in special graph classes and in proving bounds for 2-edge-connected subgraph…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-03-29 Arash Haddadan , Alantha Newman

We introduce two new no-regret algorithms for the stochastic shortest path (SSP) problem with a linear MDP that significantly improve over the only existing results of (Vial et al., 2021). Our first algorithm is computationally efficient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Liyu Chen , Rahul Jain , Haipeng Luo

We present a black-box reduction from the path version of the Traveling Salesman Problem (Path TSP) to the classical tour version (TSP). More precisely, we show that given an $\alpha$-approximation algorithm for TSP, then, for any $\epsilon…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2019-07-25 Vera Traub , Jens Vygen , Rico Zenklusen

The Constraint Shortest Path (CSP) problem is as follows. An $n$-vertex graph is given, each edge/arc assigned two weights. Let us call them "cost" and "length" for definiteness. Finding a min-cost upper-bounded length path between a given…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Adil Erzin , Roman Plotnikov , Ilya Ladygin

We give improved approximations for two metric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) variants. In Ordered TSP (OTSP) we are given a linear ordering on a subset of nodes $o_1, \ldots, o_k$. The TSP solution must have that $o_{i+1}$ is visited at…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Martin Böhm , Zachary Friggstad , Tobias Mömke , Joachim Spoerhase

In the Steiner Tree Augmentation Problem (STAP), we are given a graph $G = (V,E)$, a set of terminals $R \subseteq V$, and a Steiner tree $T$ spanning $R$. The edges $L := E \setminus E(T)$ are called links and have non-negative costs. The…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-11-15 R. Ravi , Weizhong Zhang , Michael Zlatin

We study the replacement paths problem in the $\mathsf{CONGEST}$ model of distributed computing. Given an $s$-$t$ shortest path $P$, the goal is to compute, for every edge $e$ in $P$, the shortest-path distance from $s$ to $t$ avoiding $e$.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Yi-Jun Chang , Yanyu Chen , Dipan Dey , Gopinath Mishra , Hung Thuan Nguyen , Bryce Sanchez

We present approximation algorithms for almost all variants of the multi-criteria traveling salesman problem (TSP). First, we devise randomized approximation algorithms for multi-criteria maximum traveling salesman problems (Max-TSP). For…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-07-14 Bodo Manthey