Related papers: On Self-Reducibility and Reoptimization of Closest…
We study the approximability of two related problems on graphs with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges: $n$-Pairs Shortest Paths ($n$-PSP), where the goal is to find a shortest path between $O(n)$ prespecified pairs, and All Node Shortest Cycles…
In the Boolean maximum constraint satisfaction problem - Max CSP$(\Gamma)$ - one is given a collection of weighted applications of constraints from a finite constraint language $\Gamma$, over a common set of variables, and the goal is to…
Several large-scale machine learning tasks, such as data summarization, can be approached by maximizing functions that satisfy submodularity. These optimization problems often involve complex side constraints, imposed by the underlying…
We study the natural problem of Triplet Reconstruction (also Rooted Triplets Consistency or Triplet Clustering), originally motivated in computational biology and relational databases (Aho, Sagiv, Szymanski, and Ullman, 1981): given $n$…
Valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) are discrete optimisation problems with a $(\mathbb{Q}\cup\{\infty\})$-valued objective function given as a sum of fixed-arity functions. In Boolean surjective VCSPs, variables take on labels…
The Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is ubiquitous in various areas of mathematics and computer science. Many of its variations have been studied including the Counting CSP, where the goal is to find the number of solutions to a CSP…
We study the problem of computing a minimum equivalent digraph (also known as the problem of computing a strong transitive reduction) and its maximum objective function variant, with two types of extensions. First, we allow to declare a set…
We study parameterized Constraint Satisfaction Problem for infinite constraint languages. The parameters that we study are weight of the satisfying assignment, number of constraints, maximum number of occurrences of a variable in the…
We consider the robust version of items selection problem, in which the goal is to choose representatives from a family of sets, preserving constraints on the allowed items' combinations. We prove NP-hardness of the deterministic version,…
We initiate the study of fine-grained completeness theorems for exact and approximate optimization in the polynomial-time regime. Inspired by the first completeness results for decision problems in P (Gao, Impagliazzo, Kolokolova, Williams,…
We give simple deterministic reductions demonstrating the NP-hardness of approximating the nearest codeword problem and minimum distance problem within arbitrary constant factors (and almost-polynomial factors assuming NP cannot be solved…
The Restricted Shortest Path (RSP) problem, also known as the Delay-Constrained Least-Cost (DCLC) problem, is an NP-hard bicriteria optimization problem on graphs with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. In a graph where each edge is assigned a…
Many fundamental problems in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, and verification involve reasoning about sets and relations between sets and can be modeled as set constraint satisfaction problems (set CSPs). Such problems…
A value of a CSP instance is typically defined as a fraction of constraints that can be simultaneously met. We propose an alternative definition of a value of an instance and show that, for purely combinatorial reasons, a value of an…
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…
Block Sorting is a well studied problem, motivated by its applications in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Computational Biology. Block Sorting has been shown to be NP-Hard, and two separate polynomial time 2-approximation…
We consider the class of counting problems,i.e. functions in $\#$P, which are self reducible, and have easy decision version, i.e. for every input it is easy to decide if the value of the function $f(x)$ is zero. For example,…
Sensitivity measures how much the output of an algorithm changes, in terms of Hamming distance, when part of the input is modified. While approximation algorithms with low sensitivity have been developed for many problems, no sensitivity…
Constrained optimization problems appear in a wide variety of challenging real-world problems, where constraints often capture the physics of the underlying system. Classic methods for solving these problems rely on iterative algorithms…
We study methods for transforming valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) to binary VCSPs. First, we show that the standard dual encoding preserves many aspects of the algebraic properties that capture the computational complexity…