Related papers: Smoothed complexity of local Max-Cut and binary Ma…
We study popular local search and greedy algorithms for scheduling. The performance guarantee of these algorithms is well understood, but the worst-case lower bounds seem somewhat contrived and it is questionable if they arise in practical…
Dasgupta recently introduced a cost function for the hierarchical clustering of a set of points given pairwise similarities between them. He showed that this function is NP-hard to optimize, but a top-down recursive partitioning heuristic…
We study dynamic $(1-\epsilon)$-approximate rounding of fractional matchings -- a key ingredient in numerous breakthroughs in the dynamic graph algorithms literature. Our first contribution is a surprisingly simple deterministic rounding…
We describe algorithms to efficiently compute minimum $(s,t)$-cuts and global minimum cuts of undirected surface-embedded graphs. Given an edge-weighted undirected graph $G$ with $n$ vertices embedded on an orientable surface of genus $g$,…
Explaining the excellent practical performance of the simplex method for linear programming has been a major topic of research for over 50 years. One of the most successful frameworks for understanding the simplex method was given by…
It is known that a better than $2$-approximation algorithm for the girth in dense directed unweighted graphs needs $n^{3-o(1)}$ time unless one uses fast matrix multiplication. Meanwhile, the best known approximation factor for a…
We give a deterministic algorithm for finding the minimum (weight) cut of an undirected graph on $n$ vertices and $m$ edges using $\text{polylog}(n)$ calls to any maximum flow subroutine. Using the current best deterministic maximum flow…
In this paper we describe a randomized algorithm which returns a maximal spanning forest of an unknown {\em weighted} undirected graph making $O(n)$ $\mathsf{CUT}$ queries in expectation. For weighted graphs, this is optimal due to a result…
We study the computational complexity of approximately computing the partition function of a spin system. Techniques based on standard counting-to-sampling reductions yield $\tilde{O}(n^2)$-time algorithms, where $n$ is the size of the…
Exact solution of hard combinatorial optimization problems often relies on strong convex relaxations, but solving these relaxations repeatedly inside a branch-and-bound algorithm can be prohibitively expensive. Hence, we consider this…
Local search is a widely used technique for tackling challenging optimization problems, offering simplicity and strong empirical performance across various problem domains. In this paper, we address the problem of scheduling a set of jobs…
We propose a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm for the \textsc{Max-Cut} problem on embedded 1-planar graphs parameterized by the crossing number $k$ of the given embedding. A graph is called 1-planar if it can be drawn in the plane with…
We initiate a study of the streaming complexity of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) when the constraints arrive in a random order. We show that there exists a CSP, namely $\textsf{Max-DICUT}$, for which random ordering makes a…
A {\em local graph partitioning algorithm} finds a set of vertices with small conductance (i.e. a sparse cut) by adaptively exploring part of a large graph $G$, starting from a specified vertex. For the algorithm to be local, its complexity…
We investigate the time-complexity of the All-Pairs Max-Flow problem: Given a graph with $n$ nodes and $m$ edges, compute for all pairs of nodes the maximum-flow value between them. If Max-Flow (the version with a given source-sink pair…
We consider the problem of estimating the value of MAX-CUT in a graph in the streaming model of computation. At one extreme, there is a trivial $2$-approximation for this problem that uses only $O(\log n)$ space, namely, count the number of…
We study the complexity of optimizing highly smooth convex functions. For a positive integer $p$, we want to find an $\epsilon$-approximate minimum of a convex function $f$, given oracle access to the function and its first $p$ derivatives,…
We consider the problem of estimating the size of a maximum cut (Max-Cut problem) in a random Erd\H{o}s-R\'{e}nyi graph on $n$ nodes and $\lfloor cn \rfloor$ edges. It is shown in Coppersmith et al. ~\cite{Coppersmith2004} that the size of…
We study graph partitioning problems from a min-max perspective, in which an input graph on n vertices should be partitioned into k parts, and the objective is to minimize the maximum number of edges leaving a single part. The two main…
Sketching and streaming algorithms are in the forefront of current research directions for cut problems in graphs. In the streaming model, we show that $(1-\epsilon)$-approximation for Max-Cut must use $n^{1-O(\epsilon)}$ space; moreover,…