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We describe simple algebraic and combinatorial characterisations of finite relational core structures admitting finitely many obstructions. As a consequence, we show that it is decidable to determine whether a constraint satisfaction…
Sublinear time algorithms for approximating maximum matching size have long been studied. Much of the progress over the last two decades on this problem has been on the algorithmic side. For instance, an algorithm of Behnezhad [FOCS'21]…
Maximizing a non-negative, monontone, submodular function $f$ over $n$ elements under a cardinality constraint $k$ (SMCC) is a well-studied NP-hard problem. It has important applications in, e.g., machine learning and influence…
In the {\em capacitated} survivable network design problem (Cap-SNDP), we are given an undirected multi-graph where each edge has a capacity and a cost. The goal is to find a minimum cost subset of edges that satisfies a given set of…
We study the problem of approximating the value of a Unique Game instance in the streaming model. A simple count of the number of constraints divided by $p$, the alphabet size of the Unique Game, gives a trivial $p$-approximation that can…
In the Maximum Independent Set problem we are asked to find a set of pairwise nonadjacent vertices in a given graph with the maximum possible cardinality. In general graphs, this classical problem is known to be NP-hard and hard to…
A Boolean maximum constraint satisfaction problem, Max-CSP($f$), is specified by a predicate $f:\{-1,1\}^k\to\{0,1\}$. An $n$-variable instance of Max-CSP($f$) consists of a list of constraints, each of which applies $f$ to $k$ distinct…
We study the inapproximability of the induced disjoint paths problem on an arbitrary $n$-node $m$-edge undirected graph, which is to connect the maximum number of the $k$ source-sink pairs given in the graph via induced disjoint paths. It…
Effective resistance is an important metric that measures the similarity of two vertices in a graph. It has found applications in graph clustering, recommendation systems and network reliability, among others. In spite of the importance of…
The problem of finding longest common subsequence (LCS) is one of the fundamental problems in computer science, which finds application in fields such as computational biology, text processing, information retrieval, data compression etc.…
We prove new results for approximating the graphic TSP and some related problems. We obtain polynomial-time algorithms with improved approximation guarantees. For the graphic TSP itself, we improve the approximation ratio to 7/5. For a…
In the classical Node-Disjoint Paths (NDP) problem, we are given an $n$-vertex graph $G=(V,E)$, and a collection $M=\{(s_1,t_1),\ldots,(s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of its vertices, called source-destination, or demand pairs. The goal is to route…
We study the Constraint Satisfaction Problem CSP(A), where A is first-order definable in (Z;+,1) and contains +. We prove such problems are either in P or NP-complete.
The Bin Packing Problem is one of the most important optimization problems. In recent years, due to its NP-hard nature, several approximation algorithms have been presented. It is proved that the best algorithm for the Bin Packing Problem…
Optimization problems consist of either maximizing or minimizing an objective function. Instead of looking for a maximum solution (resp. minimum solution), one can find a minimum maximal solution (resp. maximum minimal solution). Such…
Constrained submodular maximization has been extensively studied in the recent years. In this paper, we study adaptive robust optimization with nearly submodular structure (ARONSS). Our objective is to randomly select a subset of items that…
Consider the geometric range space $(X, \mathcal{H}_d)$ where $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and $\mathcal{H}_d$ is the set of ranges defined by $d$-dimensional halfspaces. In this setting we consider that $X$ is the disjoint union of a red and…
We prove explicit approximation hardness results for the Graphic TSP on cubic and subcubic graphs as well as the new inapproximability bounds for the corresponding instances of the (1,2)-TSP. The proof technique uses new modular…
Given a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) on $n$ variables, $x_1, x_2, \dots, x_n \in \{\pm 1\}$, and $m$ constraints, a global cardinality constraint has the form of $\sum_{i = 1}^{n} x_i = (1-2p)n$, where $p \in (\Omega(1), 1 -…
We study the scheduling problem of makespan minimization while taking machine conflicts into account. Machine conflicts arise in various settings, e.g., shared resources for pre- and post-processing of tasks or spatial restrictions. In this…