English
Related papers

Related papers: Hardness Amplification of Optimization Problems

200 papers

We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-17 Xi Chen , George Matikas , Dimitris Paparas , Mihalis Yannakakis

We establish two new direct product theorems for the randomized query complexity of Boolean functions. The first shows that computing $n$ copies of a function $f$, even with a small success probability of $\gamma^n$, requires $\Theta(n)$…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Shalev Ben-David , Eric Blais

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality, which refers to the fact that large-scale problems often lead to exponentially high sample complexity. A common solution is to use deep neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-13 Chenbei Lu , Laixi Shi , Zaiwei Chen , Chenye Wu , Adam Wierman

This paper investigates the computational complexity of reinforcement learning in a novel linear function approximation regime, termed partial $q^{\pi}$-realizability. In this framework, the objective is to learn an $\epsilon$-optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Shayan Karimi , Xiaoqi Tan

Integration is affected by the curse of dimensionality and quickly becomes intractable as the dimensionality of the problem grows. We propose a randomized algorithm that, with high probability, gives a constant-factor approximation of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-02-28 Stefano Ermon , Carla P. Gomes , Ashish Sabharwal , Bart Selman

Given data drawn from an unknown distribution, $D$, to what extent is it possible to ``amplify'' this dataset and output an even larger set of samples that appear to have been drawn from $D$? We formalize this question as follows: an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Brian Axelrod , Shivam Garg , Vatsal Sharan , Gregory Valiant

The problem of maximizing the $p$-th power of a $p$-norm over a halfspace-presented polytope in $\R^d$ is a convex maximization problem which plays a fundamental role in computational convexity. It has been shown in 1986 that this problem…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2013-07-25 Christian Knauer , Stefan König , Daniel Werner

Mathematical optimization, although often leading to NP-hard models, is now capable of solving even large-scale instances within reasonable time. However, the primary focus is often placed solely on optimality. This implies that while…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-12-23 Kevin-Martin Aigner , Marc Goerigk , Michael Hartisch , Frauke Liers , Arthur Miehlich , Florian Rösel

In this paper we study the (Bichromatic) Maximum Inner Product Problem (Max-IP), in which we are given sets $A$ and $B$ of vectors, and the goal is to find $a \in A$ and $b \in B$ maximizing inner product $a \cdot b$. Max-IP is very basic…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-03-07 Lijie Chen

We introduce and study a discrete multi-period extension of the classical knapsack problem, dubbed generalized incremental knapsack. In this setting, we are given a set of $n$ items, each associated with a non-negative weight, and $T$ time…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Yuri Faenza , Danny Segev , Lingyi Zhang

We consider an assortment optimization problem under the multinomial logit choice model with general covering constraints. In this problem, the seller offers an assortment that should contain a minimum number of products from multiple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-06 Omar El Housni , Qing Feng , Huseyin Topaloglu

The Matrix-based Renyi's entropy enables us to directly measure information quantities from given data without the costly probability density estimation of underlying distributions, thus has been widely adopted in numerous statistical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-05-17 Yuxin Dong , Tieliang Gong , Shujian Yu , Chen Li

This paper investigates a series of optimization problems for one-counter Markov decision processes (MDPs) and integer-weighted MDPs with finite state space. Specifically, it considers problems addressing termination probabilities and…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Jakob Piribauer , Christel Baier

We discuss the computational complexity of approximating maximum a posteriori inference in sum-product networks. We first show NP-hardness in trees of height two by a reduction from maximum independent set; this implies non-approximability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-09-06 Diarmaid Conaty , Denis D. Mauá , Cassio P. de Campos

An algorithm is proposed, analyzed, and tested for solving continuous nonlinear-equality-constrained optimization problems where the objective and constraint functions are defined by expectations or averages over large, finite numbers of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-14 Frank E. Curtis , Lingjun Guo , Daniel P. Robinson

We determine the power of the weighted sum scalarization with respect to the computation of approximations for general multiobjective minimization and maximization problems. Additionally, we introduce a new multi-factor notion of…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Cristina Bazgan , Stefan Ruzika , Clemens Thielen , Daniel Vanderpooten

An NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem $\Pi$ is said to have an {\em approximation threshold} if there is some $t$ such that the optimal value of $\Pi$ can be approximated in polynomial time within a ratio of $t$, and it is NP-hard…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2008-12-15 Uriel Feige

We consider the Demand Strip Packing problem (DSP), in which we are given a set of jobs, each specified by a processing time and a demand. The task is to schedule all jobs such that they are finished before some deadline $D$ while…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Franziska Eberle , Felix Hommelsheim , Malin Rau , Stefan Walzer

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,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Karl Bringmann , Alejandro Cassis , Nick Fischer , Marvin Künnemann

We propose \emph{MaxUp}, an embarrassingly simple, highly effective technique for improving the generalization performance of machine learning models, especially deep neural networks. The idea is to generate a set of augmented data with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 Chengyue Gong , Tongzheng Ren , Mao Ye , Qiang Liu