Related papers: The matching polytope does not admit fully-polynom…
A perfect matching in an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ is a set of vertex disjoint edges from $E$ that include all vertices in $V$. The perfect matching problem is to decide if $G$ has such a matching. Recently Rothvo{\ss} proved the striking…
A popular method in combinatorial optimization is to express polytopes P, which may potentially have exponentially many facets, as solutions of linear programs that use few extra variables to reduce the number of constraints down to a…
This paper investigates the extension complexity of polytopes by exploiting the correspondence between non-negative factorizations of slack matrices and randomized communication protocols. We introduce a geometric characterization of…
Yannakakis showed that the matching problem does not have a small symmetric linear program. Rothvo{\ss} recently proved that any, not necessarily symmetric, linear program also has exponential size. It is natural to ask whether the matching…
We illustrate the limitations of the hyperplane separation bound, a non-combinatorial lower bound on the extension complexity of a polytope. Most notably, this bounding technique is used by Rothvo{\ss} (J ACM 64.6:41, 2017) to establish an…
We introduce the simple extension complexity of a polytope P as the smallest number of facets of any simple (i.e., non-degenerate in the sense of linear programming) polytope which can be projected onto P. We devise a combinatorial method…
We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on $n$-vertex graphs are not the…
Joint object matching, also known as multi-image matching, namely, the problem of finding consistent partial maps among all pairs of objects within a collection, is a crucial task in many areas of computer vision. This problem subsumes…
Permutation Pattern Matching (or PPM) is a decision problem whose input is a pair of permutations $\pi$ and $\tau$, represented as sequences of integers, and the task is to determine whether $\tau$ contains a subsequence order-isomorphic to…
Sometimes, it is possible to represent a complicated polytope as a projection of a much simpler polytope. To quantify this phenomenon, the extension complexity of a polytope $P$ is defined to be the minimum number of facets of a (possibly…
We prove that any extended formulation that approximates the matching polytope on $n$-vertex graphs up to a factor of $(1+\varepsilon)$ for any $\frac2n \le \varepsilon \le 1$ must have at least $\binom{n}{{\alpha}/{\varepsilon}}$ defining…
Let $D$ be the set of $n\times n$ positive semidefinite matrices of trace equal to one, also known as the set of density matrices. We prove two results on the hardness of approximating $D$ with polytopes. First, we show that if $0 <…
Motivated by the need to better understand the properties of sparse cutting-planes used in mixed integer programming solvers, the paper [2] studied the idealized problem of how well a polytope is approximated by the use of sparse valid…
We address combinatorial problems that can be formulated as minimization of a partially separable function of discrete variables (energy minimization in graphical models, weighted constraint satisfaction, pseudo-Boolean optimization, 0-1…
In this paper, we propose new lower and upper bounds on the linear extension complexity of regular $n$-gons. Our bounds are based on the equivalence between the computation of (i) an extended formulation of size $r$ of a polytope $P$, and…
Error bounds have been studied for more than seventy years, beginning with the seminal result of Hoffman (1952) [{\it J. Res. Natl. Bur. Standards}, 49 (1952), 263--265], which establishes an upper bound for the distance from an arbitrary…
Exploring the power of linear programming for combinatorial optimization problems has been recently receiving renewed attention after a series of breakthrough impossibility results. From an algorithmic perspective, the related questions…
We study the problem of approximating the value of the matching polynomial on graphs with edge parameter $\gamma$, where $\gamma$ takes arbitrary values in the complex plane. When $\gamma$ is a positive real, Jerrum and Sinclair showed that…
The odd-red bipartite perfect matching problem asks to find a perfect matching containing an odd number of red edges in a given red-blue edge-colored bipartite graph. While this problem lies in $\mathsf{P}$, its polyhedral structure remains…
This thesis explores algorithmic applications and limitations of convex relaxation hierarchies for approximating some discrete and continuous optimization problems. - We show a dichotomy of approximability of constraint satisfaction…