Related papers: Hardness of Approximation for Morse Matching
Piecewise-linear (PL) Morse theory and discrete Morse theory are used in shape analysis tasks to investigate the topological features of discretized spaces. In spite of their common origin in smooth Morse theory, various notions of critical…
The Morse-Smale complex is a standard tool in visual data analysis. The classic definition is based on a continuous view of the gradient of a scalar function where its zeros are the critical points. These points are connected via gradient…
We solve the problem of minimizing the number of critical points among all functions on a surface within a prescribed distance {\delta} from a given input function. The result is achieved by establishing a connection between discrete Morse…
In this paper, we investigate the approximability of two node deletion problems. Given a vertex weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ and a specified, or "distinguished" vertex $p \in V$, MDD(min) is the problem of finding a minimum weight vertex set $S…
The Mayer-Vietoris theorem is known for its wide applications, especially in determining homology. In fact, this theorem provides us with a long exact sequence, where the underlying homology groups fit in. However, this theorem does not…
Morse complexes and Morse-Smale complexes are topological descriptors popular in topology-based visualization. Comparing these complexes plays an important role in their applications in feature correspondences, feature tracking, symmetry…
Finding sparse vectors is a fundamental problem that arises in several contexts including codes, subspaces, and lattices. In this work, we prove strong inapproximability results for all these variants using a novel approach that even…
The problem of approximating a dense matrix by a product of sparse factors is a fundamental problem for many signal processing and machine learning tasks. It can be decomposed into two subproblems: finding the position of the non-zero…
In this paper we present a new approach to computing homology (with field coefficients) and persistent homology. We use concepts from discrete Morse theory, to provide an algorithm which can be expressed solely in terms of simple graph…
This thesis explores algorithmic applications and limitations of convex relaxation hierarchies for approximating some discrete and continuous optimization problems. - We show a dichotomy of approximability of constraint satisfaction…
We consider the problem of minimizing a convex objective which is the sum of a smooth part, with Lipschitz continuous gradient, and a nonsmooth part. Inspired by various applications, we focus on the case when the nonsmooth part is a…
Notions of graph similarity provide alternative perspective on the graph isomorphism problem and vice-versa. In this paper, we consider measures of similarity arising from mismatch norms as studied in Gervens and Grohe: the edit distance…
Let $G$ be a complete edge-weighted graph on $n$ vertices. To each subset of vertices of $G$ assign the cost of the minimum spanning tree of the subset as its weight. Suppose that $n$ is a multiple of some fixed positive integer $k$. The…
We study the approximability of the NP-complete \textsc{Maximum Minimal Feedback Vertex Set} problem. Informally, this natural problem seems to lie in an intermediate space between two more well-studied problems of this type:…
We study a combinatorial problem called Minimum Maximal Matching, where we are asked to find in a general graph the smallest that can not be extended. We show that this problem is hard to approximate with a constant smaller than 2, assuming…
We present approximation algorithms for the following NP-hard optimization problems related to bottleneck spanning trees in metric spaces. 1. The disjoint bottleneck spanning tree problem: Given $n$ pairs of points in a metric space, find…
The classic lower bound of Kuhn, Moscibroda and Wattenhofer [JACM 2016] states that approximate maximum matching and approximate vertex cover (among other problems) in the LOCAL model require $\Omega(\min\{\sqrt{\frac{\log n}{\log\log n}},…
We consider the following basic problem: given an $n$-variate degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$ with real coefficients, compute a unit vector $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ that maximizes $|f(x)|$. Besides its fundamental nature, this problem…
Topological abstractions offer a method to summarize the behavior of vector fields but computing them robustly can be challenging due to numerical precision issues. One alternative is to represent the vector field using a discrete approach,…
To any finite simplicial complex X, we associate a natural filtration starting from Chari and Joswig's discrete Morse complex and abutting to the matching complex of X. This construction leads to the definition of several homology theories,…