Related papers: Hardness Results for Approximate Pure Horn CNF For…
We show that it is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard to approximate the hyperspherical radius of a triangulated manifold up to an almost-polynomial factor.
We prove that the logarithm of the permanent of an nxn real matrix A and the logarithm of the hafnian of a 2nx2n real symmetric matrix A can be approximated within an additive error 1 > epsilon > 0 by a polynomial p in the entries of A of…
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…
We show that for every positive $\epsilon > 0$, unless NP $\subset$ BPQP, it is impossible to approximate the maximum quadratic assignment problem within a factor better than $2^{\log^{1-\epsilon} n}$ by a reduction from the maximum label…
We study the problems of finding a shortest synchronizing word and its length for a given prefix code. This is done in two different settings: when the code is defined by an arbitrary decoder recognizing its star and when the code is…
We study the approximability of the NP-complete \textsc{Maximum Minimal Feedback Vertex Set} problem. Informally, this natural problem seems to lie in an intermediate space between two more well-studied problems of this type:…
We prove the #P-hardness of the counting problems associated with various satisfiability, graph and combinatorial problems, when restricted to planar instances. These problems include \begin{romannum} \item[{}] {\sc 3Sat, 1-3Sat, 1-Ex3Sat,…
We show that for every $k\in\mathbb{N}$ and $\varepsilon>0$, for large enough alphabet $R$, given a $k$-CSP with alphabet size $R$, it is NP-hard to distinguish between the case that there is an assignment satisfying at least…
We present a simple randomized polynomial time algorithm to approximate the mixed discriminant of $n$ positive semidefinite $n \times n$ matrices within a factor $2^{O(n)}$. Consequently, the algorithm allows us to approximate in randomized…
Multidimensional packing problems generalize the classical packing problems such as Bin Packing, Multiprocessor Scheduling by allowing the jobs to be $d$-dimensional vectors. While the approximability of the scalar problems is well…
Given a satisfiable 3-SAT formula, how hard is it to find an assignment to the variables that has Hamming distance at most n/2 to a satisfying assignment? More generally, consider any polynomial-time verifier for any NP-complete language. A…
We consider the Minimum Convex Partition problem: Given a set P of n points in the plane, draw a plane graph G on P, with positive minimum degree, such that G partitions the convex hull of P into a minimum number of convex faces. We show…
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under noise. There has been a great deal of work on optimization of submodular functions under various constraints, resulting in algorithms that provide desirable…
Strip packing is a classical packing problem, where the goal is to pack a set of rectangular objects into a strip of a given width, while minimizing the total height of the packing. The problem has multiple applications, e.g. in scheduling…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function is the minimum degree of real polynomial that approximates it pointwise. For any Boolean function, its approximate degree serves as a lower bound on its quantum query complexity, and generically…
We prove that SVP$_p$ is NP-hard to approximate within a factor of $2^{\log^{1 - \varepsilon} n}$, for all constants $\varepsilon > 0$ and $p > 2$, under standard deterministic Karp reductions. This result is also the first proof that…
In this paper, we prove that it is W[2]-hard to approximate k-SetCover within any constant ratio. Our proof is built upon the recently developed threshold graph composition technique. We propose a strong notion of threshold graphs and use a…
This paper addresses the problem of finding a B-term wavelet representation of a given discrete function $f \in \real^n$ whose distance from f is minimized. The problem is well understood when we seek to minimize the Euclidean distance…
In this paper we consider two problems concerning string factorisation. Specifically given a string $w$ and an integer $k$ find a factorisation of $w$ where each factor has length bounded by $k$ and has the minimum (the FmD problem) or the…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f \colon \{-1, 1\}^n \rightarrow \{-1, 1\}$ is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise to error at most $1/3$. We introduce a generic method for increasing the…