Related papers: On Self-Reducibility and Reoptimization of Closest…
The problem of minimizing a polynomial over the standard simplex is one of the basic NP-hard nonlinear optimization problems --- it contains the maximum clique problem in graphs as a special case. It is known that the problem allows a…
The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is among the most famous NP-hard optimization problems. We design for this problem a randomized polynomial-time algorithm that computes a (1+eps)-approximation to the optimal tour, for any fixed eps>0,…
We consider several combinatorial optimization problems which combine the classic shop scheduling problems, namely open shop scheduling or job shop scheduling, and the shortest path problem. The objective of the obtained problem is to…
We propose the k-Shortest-Path (k-SP) constraint: a novel constraint on the agent's trajectory that improves the sample efficiency in sparse-reward MDPs. We show that any optimal policy necessarily satisfies the k-SP constraint. Notably,…
We initiate the theoretical study of Ext-TSP, a problem that originates in the area of profile-guided binary optimization. Given a graph $G=(V, E)$ with positive edge weights $w: E \rightarrow R^+$, and a non-increasing discount function…
We study the Parallel Task Scheduling problem $Pm|size_j|C_{\max}$ with a constant number of machines. This problem is known to be strongly NP-complete for each $m \geq 5$, while it is solvable in pseudo-polynomial time for each $m \leq 3$.…
The question if a given partial solution to a problem can be extended reasonably occurs in many algorithmic approaches for optimization problems. For instance, when enumerating minimal dominating sets of a graph $G=(V,E)$, one usually…
The Constraint Shortest Path (CSP) problem is as follows. An $n$-vertex graph is given, each edge/arc assigned two weights. Let us call them "cost" and "length" for definiteness. Finding a min-cost upper-bounded length path between a given…
We present a computationally-efficient method for recovering sparse signals from a series of noisy observations, known as the problem of compressed sensing (CS). CS theory requires solving a convex constrained minimization problem. We…
Optimization is fundamental in many areas of science, from computer science and information theory to engineering and statistical physics, as well as to biology or social sciences. It typically involves a large number of variables and a…
Robust Optimization is becoming increasingly important in machine learning applications. This paper studies the problem of robust submodular minimization subject to combinatorial constraints. Constrained Submodular Minimization arises in…
We settle the pseudo-polynomial complexity of the Demand Strip Packing (DSP) problem: Given a strip of fixed width and a set of items with widths and heights, the items must be placed inside the strip with the objective of minimizing the…
In the minimum common string partition (MCSP) problem two related input strings are given. "Related" refers to the property that both strings consist of the same set of letters appearing the same number of times in each of the two strings.…
We study optimisation problems that can be formulated as valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSP). A problem from VCSP is characterised by a \emph{constraint language}, a fixed set of cost functions taking finite and infinite costs…
The non-redundancy (NRD) of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is a combinatorial quantity closely tied to the behavior of CSPs in various computational models including their sparsification, kernelization, and streaming complexity. A…
Consider the regularized sparse minimization problem, which involves empirical sums of loss functions for $n$ data points (each of dimension $d$) and a nonconvex sparsity penalty. We prove that finding an…
An important question in the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSP) is understanding how the graph or hypergraph describing the incidence structure of the constraints influences the complexity of the problem. For binary CSP…
We show that certain ways of solving some combinatorial optimization problems can be understood as using query planes to divide the space of problem instances into polyhedra that could fit into those that characterize the problem's various…
A Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) is a framework used for modeling and solving constrained problems. Tree-search algorithms like backtracking try to construct a solution to a CSP by selecting the variables of the problem one after…
Bitstrings can be permuted via permutations and compared via the lexicographic order. In this paper we study the complexity of finding a minimum of a bitstring via given permutations. As a global optima is known to be NP-complete, we study…