Related papers: A Characterization of Approximation Resistance
We study the performance of Fictitious Play, when used as a heuristic for finding an approximate Nash equilibrium of a 2-player game. We exhibit a class of 2-player games having payoffs in the range [0,1] that show that Fictitious Play…
Performative prediction captures the phenomenon where deploying a predictive model shifts the underlying data distribution. While simple retraining dynamics are known to converge linearly when the performative effects are weak ($\rho < 1$),…
Let $P$ be a $k$-ary predicate over a finite alphabet. Consider a random CSP$(P)$ instance $I$ over $n$ variables with $m$ constraints. When $m \gg n$ the instance $I$ will be unsatisfiable with high probability, and we want to find a…
In this paper we study the interactions between so-called fractional relaxations of the integer programs (IPs) which encode homomorphism and isomorphism of relational structures. We give a combinatorial characterization of a certain natural…
Estimating a constrained relation is a fundamental problem in machine learning. Special cases are classification (the problem of estimating a map from a set of to-be-classified elements to a set of labels), clustering (the problem of…
This paper considers an optimization problem for a dynamical system whose evolution depends on a collection of binary decision variables. We develop scalable approximation algorithms with provable suboptimality bounds to provide…
Stochastic saddle point (SSP) problems are, in general, less studied compared to stochastic minimization problems. However, SSP problems emerge from machine learning (adversarial training, e.g., GAN, AUC maximization), statistics (robust…
Biological and physical systems often exhibit distinct structures at different spatial/temporal scales. Persistent homology is an algebraic tool that provides a mathematical framework for analyzing the multi-scale structures frequently…
We study the approximability of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) by linear programming (LP) relaxations. We show that for every CSP, the approximation obtained by a basic LP relaxation, is no weaker than the approximation obtained…
We propose a safe approximation to joint chance-constrained programming where the constraint functions are additively dependent on a normally-distributed random vector. The approximation is analytical, meaning that it requires neither…
Probabilistically checkable proofs of proximity (PCPP) are proof systems where the verifier is given a 3SAT formula, but has only oracle access to an assignment and a proof. The verifier accepts a satisfying assignment with a valid proof,…
Maximum satisfiability is a canonical NP-hard optimization problem that appears empirically hard for random instances. Let us say that a Conjunctive normal form (CNF) formula consisting of $k$-clauses is $p$-satisfiable if there exists a…
We study weakest precondition reasoning about the (co)variance of outcomes and the variance of run-times of probabilistic programs with conditioning. For outcomes, we show that approximating (co)variances is computationally more difficult…
If you are predicting the label $y$ of a new object with $\hat y$, how confident are you that $y = \hat y$? Conformal prediction methods provide an elegant framework for answering such question by building a $100 (1 - \alpha)\%$ confidence…
This paper proposes a robust approximation method for solving chance constrained optimization (CCO) of polynomials. Assume the CCO is defined with an individual chance constraint that is affine in the decision variables. We construct a…
We study the satisfiability of ordering constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) above average. We prove the conjecture of Gutin, van Iersel, Mnich, and Yeo that the satisfiability above average of ordering CSPs of arity $k$ is…
We study a combinatorial problem called Minimum Maximal Matching, where we are asked to find in a general graph the smallest that can not be extended. We show that this problem is hard to approximate with a constant smaller than 2, assuming…
The Promise Constraint Satisfaction Problem (PCSP) is a recently introduced vast generalization of the Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP). We investigate the computational complexity of a class of PCSPs beyond the most studied cases -…
We introduce and study the problem of adversarial arithmetic, which provides a simple yet challenging testbed for language model alignment. This problem is comprised of arithmetic questions posed in natural language, with an arbitrary…
In this paper we combine two existing approaches for approximating attractors. One of them approximates the attractors arbitrarily well by sublevel sets related to solutions of infinite dimensional linear programming problems. A downside…