Related papers: An Improved Approximation for $k$-median, and Posi…

We revisit the classic #Knapsack problem, which asks to count the Boolean points $(x_1,\dots,x_n)\in\{0,1\}^n$ in a given half-space $\sum_{i=1}^nW_ix_i\le T$. This #P-complete problem admits $(1\pm\epsilon)$-approximation. Before this…

We present a new local-search algorithm for the $k$-median clustering problem. We show that local optima for this algorithm give a $(2.836+\epsilon)$-approximation; our result improves upon the $(3+\epsilon)$-approximate local-search…

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems are fundamental in online decision-making and have been instrumental in finding an optimal policy for Markov decision processes (MDPs). Function approximations are usually deployed to handle large or…

We study the $k$-median with discounts problem, wherein we are given clients with non-negative discounts and seek to open at most $k$ facilities. The goal is to minimize the sum of distances from each client to its nearest open facility…

Aaronson and Ambainis (SICOMP `18) showed that any partial function on $N$ bits that can be computed with an advantage $\delta$ over a random guess by making $q$ quantum queries, can also be computed classically with an advantage $\delta/2$…

Semidefinite programming is a powerful tool in the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, the random hyperplane rounding method of Goemans and Williamson has been extensively…

We give lower bounds for the problem of stable sparse recovery from /adaptive/ linear measurements. In this problem, one would like to estimate a vector $x \in \R^n$ from $m$ linear measurements $A_1x,..., A_mx$. One may choose each vector…

Clustering is a basic task in data analysis and machine learning, and the optimization of clustering objectives are well-studied optimization problems; amongst these, the $k$-Means objective is arguably the most well known. Given a…

In the dynamic metric $k$-median problem, we wish to maintain a set of $k$ centers $S \subseteq V$ in an input metric space $(V, d)$ that gets updated via point insertions/deletions, so as to minimize the objective $\sum_{x \in V} \min_{y…

We study the maximum $k$-set coverage problem in the following distributed setting. A collection of sets $S_1,\ldots,S_m$ over a universe $[n]$ is partitioned across $p$ machines and the goal is to find $k$ sets whose union covers the most…

We provide improved upper and lower bounds for the Min-Sum-Radii (MSR) and Min-Sum-Diameters (MSD) clustering problems with a bounded number of clusters $k$. In particular, we propose an exact MSD algorithm with running-time $n^{O(k)}$. We…

We consider the classical $k$-means clustering problem in the setting bi-criteria approximation, in which an algoithm is allowed to output $\beta k > k$ clusters, and must produce a clustering with cost at most $\alpha$ times the to the…

In this article, we provide an extension of the Chen-Stein inequality for Poisson approximation in the total variation distance for sums of independent Bernoulli random variables in two ways. We prove that we can improve the rate of…

We consider robust clustering problems in $\mathbb{R}^d$, specifically $k$-clustering problems (e.g., $k$-Median and $k$-Means with $m$ outliers, where the cost for a given center set $C \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ aggregates the distances from…

The $k$-median and $k$-means clustering objectives are classic objectives for modeling clustering in a metric space. Given a set of points in a metric space, the goal of the $k$-median (resp. $k$-means) problem is to find $k$ representative…

Clustering problems are fundamental to unsupervised learning. There is an increased emphasis on fairness in machine learning and AI; one representative notion of fairness is that no single demographic group should be over-represented among…

Building on the blueprint from Goemans and Williamson (1995) for the Max-Cut problem, we construct a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for orthogonally constrained quadratic optimization problems. First, we derive a semidefinite…

We give a 1.488-approximation for the classic scheduling problem of minimizing total weighted completion time on unrelated machines. This is a considerable improvement on the recent breakthrough of $(1.5 - 10^{-7})$-approximation (STOC…

We propose an adaptive accelerated smoothing technique for a nonsmooth convex optimization problem where the smoothing update rule is coupled with the momentum parameter. We also extend the setting to the case where the objective function…

We present a simple analysis of k-means|| (Bahmani et al., PVLDB 2012) -- a distributed variant of the k-means++ algorithm (Arthur and Vassilvitskii, SODA 2007). Moreover, the bound on the number of rounds is improved from $O(\log n)$ to…