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Budget Minimization is a scheduling problem with precedence constraints, i.e., a scheduling problem on a partially ordered set of jobs $(N, \unlhd)$. A job $j \in N$ is available for scheduling, if all jobs $i \in N$ with $i \unlhd j$ are…
We prove a general result demonstrating the power of Lagrangian relaxation in solving constrained maximization problems with arbitrary objective functions. This yields a unified approach for solving a wide class of {\em subset selection}…
A fundamental open problem in learning theory is to characterize the best-case teaching dimension $\operatorname{TS}_{\min}$ of a concept class $\mathcal{C}$ with finite VC dimension $d$. Resolving this problem will, in particular, settle…
Decision-theoretic troubleshooting is one of the areas to which Bayesian networks can be applied. Given a probabilistic model of a malfunctioning man-made device, the task is to construct a repair strategy with minimal expected cost. The…
We consider variants of the restricted assignment problem where a set of jobs has to be assigned to a set of machines, for each job a size and a set of eligible machines is given, and the jobs may only be assigned to eligible machines with…
We study policies aiming to minimize the weighted sum of completion times of jobs in the context of coordination mechanisms for selfish scheduling problems. Our goal is to design local policies that achieve a good price of anarchy in the…
We consider the problem of scheduling $n$ jobs to minimize the makespan on $m$ unrelated machines, where job $j$ requires time $p_{ij}$ if processed on machine $i$. A classic algorithm of Lenstra et al. yields the best known approximation…
In the Demand Strip Packing problem (DSP), we are given a time interval and a collection of tasks, each characterized by a processing time and a demand for a given resource (such as electricity, computational power, etc.). A feasible…
Prize-Collecting TSP is a variant of the traveling salesperson problem where one may drop vertices from the tour at the cost of vertex-dependent penalties. The quality of a solution is then measured by adding the length of the tour and the…
Constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) consist of a set of variables taking values from some finite domain and a set of local constraints on these variables. The objective is to find an assignment to the variables that maximizes the…
It is known that greedy methods perform well for maximizing monotone submodular functions. At the same time, such methods perform poorly in the face of non-monotonicity. In this paper, we show - arguably, surprisingly - that invoking the…
In the Shortest Common Superstring problem (SCS), one needs to find the shortest superstring for a set of strings. While SCS is NP-hard and MAX-SNP-hard, the Greedy Algorithm "choose two strings with the largest overlap; merge them; repeat"…
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function with viability constraints. This problem originates from computational biology, where we are given a phylogenetic tree over a set of species and a directed graph, the…
We formalize the problem of selecting the optimal set of options for planning as that of computing the smallest set of options so that planning converges in less than a given maximum of value-iteration passes. We first show that the problem…
The restricted max-min fair allocation problem seeks an allocation of resources to players that maximizes the minimum total value obtained by any player. It is NP-hard to approximate the problem to a ratio less than 2. Comparing the current…
We study the worst-case adaptive optimization problem with budget constraint that is useful for modeling various practical applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We investigate the near-optimality of greedy algorithms…
We present a unified framework for designing deterministic monotone polynomial time approximation schemes (PTAS's) for a wide class of scheduling problems on uniformly related machines. This class includes (among others) minimizing the…
The Column Subset Selection Problem provides a natural framework for unsupervised feature selection. Despite being a hard combinatorial optimization problem, there exist efficient algorithms that provide good approximations. The drawback of…
Automating algorithm configuration is growing increasingly necessary as algorithms come with more and more tunable parameters. It is common to tune parameters using machine learning, optimizing performance metrics such as runtime and…
We study the non-uniform capacitated multi-item lot-sizing (\lotsizing) problem. In this problem, there is a set of demands over a planning horizon of $T$ time periods and all demands must be satisfied on time. We can place an order at the…