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The sum of radii problem ($k$-MSR) asks, given a metric space on $n$ points, to place $k$ balls covering all points so as to minimize the sum of their radii. Despite extensive study from the perspectives of approximation and parameterized…
We study a two-dimensional generalization of the classical Bin Packing problem, denoted as 2D Demand Bin Packing. In this context, each bin is a horizontal timeline, and rectangular tasks (representing electric appliances or computational…
Binary quadratic programming problems have attracted much attention in the last few decades due to their potential applications. This type of problems are NP-hard in general, and still considered a challenge in the design of efficient…
The $\ell_2^2$ min-sum $k$-clustering problem is to partition an input set into clusters $C_1,\ldots,C_k$ to minimize $\sum_{i=1}^k\sum_{p,q\in C_i}\|p-q\|_2^2$. Although $\ell_2^2$ min-sum $k$-clustering is NP-hard, it is not known whether…
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…
This paper presents a polynomial-time $1/2$-approximation algorithm for maximizing nonnegative $k$-submodular functions. This improves upon the previous $\max\{1/3, 1/(1+a)\}$-approximation by Ward and \v{Z}ivn\'y~(SODA'14), where…
Given a satisfiable 3-SAT formula, how hard is it to find an assignment to the variables that has Hamming distance at most n/2 to a satisfying assignment? More generally, consider any polynomial-time verifier for any NP-complete language. A…
Consensus problems for strings and sequences appear in numerous application contexts, ranging from bioinformatics over data mining to machine learning. Closing some gaps in the literature, we show that several fundamental problems in this…
In this work, we study the hardness of approximation of the fair $k$-center problem. In this problem, we are given a set of data points in a metric space that is partitioned into groups and the task is to choose a subset of $k$-data points,…
We consider the question of approximating Max 2-CSP where each variable appears in at most $d$ constraints (but with possibly arbitrarily large alphabet). There is a simple $(\frac{d+1}{2})$-approximation algorithm for the problem. We prove…
Binary matrix factorisation is an essential tool for identifying discrete patterns in binary data. In this paper we consider the rank-k binary matrix factorisation problem (k-BMF) under Boolean arithmetic: we are given an n x m binary…
State minimization of combinatorial filters is a fundamental problem that arises, for example, in building cheap, resource-efficient robots. But exact minimization is known to be NP-hard. This paper conducts a more nuanced analysis of this…
In this paper, we investigate the butterfly factorization problem, i.e., the problem of approximating a matrix by a product of sparse and structured factors. We propose a new formal mathematical description of such factors, that encompasses…
Minimizers sampling is one of the most widely-used mechanisms for sampling strings [Roberts et al., Bioinformatics 2004]. Let $S=S[1]\ldots S[n]$ be a string over a totally ordered alphabet $\Sigma$. Further let $w\geq 2$ and $k\geq 1$ be…
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…
Given a string $s$ of length $n$ over a general alphabet and an integer $k$, the problem is to decide whether $s$ is a concatenation of $k$ nonempty palindromes. Two previously known solutions for this problem work in time $O(kn)$ and…
We consider the graph $k$-partitioning problem under the min-max objective, termed as Minmax $k$-cut. The input here is a graph $G=(V,E)$ with non-negative edge weights $w:E\rightarrow \mathbb{R}_+$ and an integer $k\geq 2$ and the goal is…
The fuzzy $K$-means problem is a generalization of the classical $K$-means problem to soft clusterings, i.e. clusterings where each points belongs to each cluster to some degree. Although popular in practice, prior to this work the fuzzy…
We consider the weighted $k$-set packing problem, in which we are given a collection of weighted sets, each with at most $k$ elements and must return a collection of pairwise disjoint sets with maximum total weight. For $k = 3$, this…
We consider the hardness of approximation of optimization problems from the point of view of definability. For many NP-hard optimization problems it is known that, unless P = NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can give an approximate solution…