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The nature has inspired several metaheuristics, outstanding among these is Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), which have proved to be very effective and efficient in problems of high complexity (NP-hard) in combinatorial optimization. This…
This letter considers optimizing user association in a heterogeneous network via utility maximization, which is a combinatorial optimization problem due to integer constraints. Different from existing solutions based on convex optimization,…
Robots are still poor at traversing cluttered large obstacles required for important applications like search and rescue. By contrast, animals are excellent at doing so, often using direct physical interaction with obstacles rather than…
We present an algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem on instances which satisfy the triangle inequality. Like several existing algorithms, it achieves approximation ratio O(log n). Unlike previous algorithms, it uses…
Motivated by the trade-off between exploitation and exploration in reinforcement learning, we study a continuous-time entropy-regularized mean variance portfolio selection problem in the presence of jumps. We propose an exploratory SDE for…
The $k$-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces $k$ edges of the tour by $k$ other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We…
Understanding how crossover works is still one of the big challenges in evolutionary computation research, and making our understanding precise and proven by mathematical means might be an even bigger one. As one of few examples where…
Under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, an integer linear program with $n$ Boolean-valued variables and $m$ equations cannot be solved in $c^n$ time for any constant $c < 2$. If the domain of the variables is relaxed to $[0,1]$, the…
We present a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the min-max multiple TSP problem in Euclidean space, where multiple traveling salesmen are tasked with visiting a set of $n$ points and the objective is to minimize the maximum…
In this paper, we begin the exploration of vertex-ordering problems through the lens of exponential-time approximation algorithms. In particular, we ask the following question: Can we simultaneously beat the running times of the fastest…
We give algorithms with running time $2^{O({\sqrt{k}\log{k}})} \cdot n^{O(1)}$ for the following problems. Given an $n$-vertex unit disk graph $G$ and an integer $k$, decide whether $G$ contains (1) a path on exactly/at least $k$ vertices,…
In the Euclidean $k$-traveling salesman problem ($k$-TSP), we are given $n$ points in the $d$-dimensional Euclidean space, for some fixed constant $d\geq 2$, and a positive integer $k$. The goal is to find a shortest tour visiting at least…
We consider the {\em Shaped Partition Problem} of partitioning $n$ given vectors in real $k$-space into $p$ parts so as to maximize an arbitrary objective function which is convex on the sum of vectors in each part, subject to arbitrary…
Given a traveling salesman problem (TSP) tour $H$ in graph $G$ a $k$-move is an operation which removes $k$ edges from $H$, and adds $k$ edges of $G$ so that a new tour $H'$ is formed. The popular $k$-OPT heuristics for TSP finds a local…
In recent years, there has been much interest in phase transitions of combinatorial problems. Phase transitions have been successfully used to analyze combinatorial optimization problems, characterize their typical-case features and locate…
We show that the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and its many variants may be modeled as functional optimization problems over a graph. In this formulation, all vertices and arcs of the graph are functionals; i.e., a mapping from a space…
The Covering Salesman Problem (CSP) is a generalization of the Traveling Salesman Problem in which the tour is not required to visit all vertices, as long as all vertices are covered by the tour. The objective of CSP is to find a minimum…
Effective Resistance (ER) is a fundamental tool in various graph learning tasks. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently approximating ER on a graph $\mathcal{G}=(\mathcal{V},\mathcal{E})$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges.…
Motivated by applications to poaching and burglary prevention, we define a class of weighted Traveling Salesman Problems on metric spaces. The goal is to output an infinite (though typically periodic) tour that visits the n points…
The cross entropy (CE) method is a model based search method to solve optimization problems where the objective function has minimal structure. The Monte-Carlo version of the CE method employs the naive sample averaging technique which is…