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Recently, gradient-based discrete sampling has emerged as a highly efficient, general-purpose solver for various combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, achieving performance comparable to or surpassing the popular data-driven approaches.…
We propose a mathematically principled PDE gradient flow framework for distributionally robust optimization (DRO). Exploiting the recent advances in the intersection of Markov Chain Monte Carlo sampling and gradient flow theory, we show…
Large scale numerical experiments are commonplace today in theoretical physics. The high performance algorithms described herein are the most compact, efficient methods known for representing and analyzing systems modeled well by sets or…
The Steiner Tree problem is a classical problem in combinatorial optimization: the goal is to connect a set $T$ of terminals in a graph $G$ by a tree of minimum size. Karpinski and Zelikovsky (1996) studied the $\delta$-dense version of…
Two fundamental algorithm-design paradigms are Tree Search and Dynamic Programming. The techniques used therein have been shown to complement one another when solving the complete set partitioning problem, also known as the coalition…
A stochastic-gradient-based interior-point algorithm for minimizing a continuously differentiable objective function (that may be nonconvex) subject to bound constraints is presented, analyzed, and demonstrated through experimental results.…
Due to its broad applications in practice, the minimum spanning tree problem and its all kinds of variations have been studied extensively during the last decades, for which a host of efficient exact and heuristic algorithms have been…
Gradient flow in the 2-Wasserstein space is widely used to optimize functionals over probability distributions and is typically implemented using an interacting particle system with $n$ particles. Analyzing these algorithms requires showing…
Finding spanning trees under various constraints is a classic problem with applications in many fields. Recently, a novel notion of "dense" ("sparse") tree, and in particular spanning tree (DST and SST respectively), is introduced as the…
In this paper we analyze a zeroth-order proximal stochastic gradient method suitable for the minimization of weakly convex stochastic optimization problems. We consider nonsmooth and nonlinear stochastic composite problems, for which…
Constrained Forest Problems (CFPs) as introduced by Goemans and Williamson in 1995 capture a wide range of network design problems with edge subsets as solutions, such as Minimum Spanning Tree, Steiner Forest, and Point-to-Point Connection.…
In this work, we unify several quantum algorithmic frameworks for boolean functions that are based on the quantum adversary bound. First, we show that the $st$-connectivity framework subsumes the (adaptive/extended) learning graph…
We introduce two new particle-based algorithms for learning latent variable models via marginal maximum likelihood estimation, including one which is entirely tuning-free. Our methods are based on the perspective of marginal maximum…
Given an undirected graph $G = (V, E)$ and a weight function $w:E \to \mathbb{R}$, the \textsc{Minimum Dominating Tree} problem asks to find a minimum weight sub-tree of $G$, $T = (U, F)$, such that every $v \in V \setminus U$ is adjacent…
Recently we submitted a paper, whose title is A New Fast Unweighted All-pairs Shortest Path Search Algorithm Based on Pruning by Shortest Path Trees, to arXiv. This is related to unweighted graphs. This paper also presents a new fast…
Computing the Wasserstein barycenter of a set of probability measures under the optimal transport metric can quickly become prohibitive for traditional second-order algorithms, such as interior-point methods, as the support size of the…
In this paper we propose and study a new complexity model for approximation algorithms. The main motivation are practical problems over large data sets that need to be solved many times for different scenarios, e.g., many multicast trees…
Network design under uncertainty arises in countless real-world settings and can be captured by the Stochastic Steiner Tree Problem (SSTP). Although there are a few approaches specifically tailored to this stochastic optimization problem,…
We consider the Steiner tree problem in quasi-bipartite graphs, where no two Steiner vertices are connected by an edge. For this class of instances, we present an efficient algorithm to exactly solve the so called directed component…
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…