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We analyze two classic variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem using the toolkit of fine-grained complexity. Our first set of results is motivated by the Bitonic TSP problem: given a set of $n$ points in the plane, compute a shortest…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-07-12 Mark de Berg , Kevin Buchin , Bart M. P. Jansen , Gerhard Woeginger

We propose a new approach to graph compression by appeal to optimal transport. The transport problem is seeded with prior information about node importance, attributes, and edges in the graph. The transport formulation can be setup for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Vikas K. Garg , Tommi Jaakkola

A tree $\sigma$-spanner of a positively real-weighted $n$-vertex and $m$-edge undirected graph $G$ is a spanning tree $T$ of $G$ which approximately preserves (i.e., up to a multiplicative stretch factor $\sigma$) distances in $G$. Tree…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-10-05 Davide Bilò , Feliciano Colella , Luciano Gualà , Stefano Leucci , Guido Proietti

We identify a sufficient condition, treewidth-pliability, that gives a polynomial-time algorithm for an arbitrarily good approximation of the optimal value in a large class of Max-2-CSPs parameterised by the class of allowed constraint…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2024-01-04 Miguel Romero , Marcin Wrochna , Stanislav Živný

For some weighted $NP$-complete problems, checking whether a proposed solution is optimal is a non-trivial task. Such is the case for the celebrated traveling salesman problem, or the spin-glass problem in 3 dimensions. In this letter, we…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Henri Orland , Michel Bauer

This paper deals with the problem of finding a collection of vertex-disjoint paths in a given graph G=(V,E) such that each path has at least four vertices and the total number of vertices in these paths is maximized. The problem is NP-hard…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Mingyang Gong , Zhi-Zhong Chen , Guohui Lin , Zhaohui Zhan

In this work, we introduce Graph Pointer Networks (GPNs) trained using reinforcement learning (RL) for tackling the traveling salesman problem (TSP). GPNs build upon Pointer Networks by introducing a graph embedding layer on the input,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-13 Qiang Ma , Suwen Ge , Danyang He , Darshan Thaker , Iddo Drori

The Traveling Salesman Problem is one of the best studied NP-hard problems in combinatorial optimization. Powerful methods have been developed over the last 60 years to find optimum solutions to large TSP instances. The largest TSP instance…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2014-03-03 Stefan Hougardy , Rasmus T. Schroeder

We give improved approximations for two metric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) variants. In Ordered TSP (OTSP) we are given a linear ordering on a subset of nodes $o_1, \ldots, o_k$. The TSP solution must have that $o_{i+1}$ is visited at…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Martin Böhm , Zachary Friggstad , Tobias Mömke , Joachim Spoerhase

The traveling salesman problem (TSP) consists of finding the length of the shortest closed tour visiting N ``cities''. We consider the Euclidean TSP where the cities are distributed randomly and independently in a d-dimensional unit…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-28 N. J. Cerf , J. Boutet de Monvel , O. Bohigas , O. C. Martin , A. G. Percus

We consider the problem of exact and inexact matching of weighted undirected graphs, in which a bijective correspondence is sought to minimize a quadratic weight disagreement. This computationally challenging problem is often relaxed as a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-10-14 Yonathan Aflalo , Alex Bronstein , Ron Kimmel

The Dubins Traveling Salesman Problem (DTSP) has generated significant interest over the last decade due to its occurrence in several civil and military surveillance applications. Currently, there is no algorithm that can find an optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-03-07 Satyanarayana Manyam , Sivakumar Rathinam

We present an exact formulation of the symmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that replaces the classical edge-selection view with a surface-building approach. Instead of selecting edges to form a cycle, the model selects a set of…

General Mathematics · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Yılmaz Arslanoğlu

This paper presents a framework to tackle combinatorial optimization problems using neural networks and reinforcement learning. We focus on the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and train a recurrent network that, given a set of city…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-16 Irwan Bello , Hieu Pham , Quoc V. Le , Mohammad Norouzi , Samy Bengio

For an $m$-edge connected simple graph $G$, finding a spanning tree of $G$ with the maximum number of leaves is MAXSNP-complete. The problem remains NP-complete even if $G$ is planar and the maximal degree of $G$ is at most four. Lu and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-02 I-Cheng Liao , Hsueh-I Lu

In this paper, we study the approximability of the metric Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and prove new explicit inapproximability bounds for that problem. The best up to now known hardness of approximation bounds were 185/184 for the…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2013-06-12 Marek Karpinski , Michael Lampis , Richard Schmied

We consider minimizing a sum of agent-specific nondifferentiable merely convex functions over the solution set of a variational inequality (VI) problem in that each agent is associated with a local monotone mapping. This problem finds an…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-13 Harshal D. Kaushik , Sepideh Samadi , Farzad Yousefian

An instance of the Connected Maximum Cut problem consists of an undirected graph G = (V, E) and the goal is to find a subset of vertices S $\subseteq$ V that maximizes the number of edges in the cut \delta(S) such that the induced graph…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-07-03 MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Guy Kortsarz , Robert MacDavid , Manish Purohit , Kanthi Sarpatwar

The traveling salesman (or salesperson) problem, short TSP, is a problem of strong interest to many researchers from mathematics, economics, and computer science. Manifold TSP variants occur in nearly every scientific field and application…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Sophia Saller , Jana Koehler , Andreas Karrenbauer

We revisit the constant-factor approximation algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem by Svensson, Tarnawski, and V\'egh. We improve on each part of this algorithm. We avoid the reduction to irreducible instances and thus…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Vera Traub , Jens Vygen