Related papers: A Structural Investigation of the Approximability …
Block Sorting is a well studied problem, motivated by its applications in Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Computational Biology. Block Sorting has been shown to be NP-Hard, and two separate polynomial time 2-approximation…
The \Problem{knapsack} problem is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization. It has been studied extensively from theoretical as well as practical perspectives as it is one of the most well-known NP-hard problems. The goal is to…
We consider the bipartite unconstrained 0-1 quadratic programming problem (BQP01) which is a generalization of the well studied unconstrained 0-1 quadratic programming problem (QP01). BQP01 has numerous applications and the problem is known…
The max-cut problem is a classical graph theory problem which is NP-complete. The best polynomial time approximation scheme relies on \emph{semidefinite programming} (SDP). We study the conditions under which graphs of certain classes have…
The Unbounded Subset-Sum Problem (USSP) is defined as: given sum $s$ and a set of integers $W\leftarrow \{p_1,\dots,p_n\}$ output a set of non-negative integers $\{y_1,\dots,y_n\}$ such that $p_1y_1+\dots+p_ny_n=s$. The USSP is an…
One of the most natural optimization problems is the k-Set Packing problem, where given a family of sets of size at most k one should select a maximum size subfamily of pairwise disjoint sets. A special case of 3-Set Packing is the well…
One of the most fundamental problems in Computer Science is the Knapsack problem. Given a set of n items with different weights and values, it asks to pick the most valuable subset whose total weight is below a capacity threshold T. Despite…
We consider the problem of maximizing the lifetime of coverage (MLCP) of targets in a wireless sensor network with battery-limited sensors. We first show that the MLCP cannot be approximated within a factor less than $\ln n$ by any…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f(x_{1},x_{2},\ldots,x_{n})$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise within $1/3$. Upper bounds on approximate degree have a variety of applications in…
The logic MMSNP is a well-studied fragment of Existential Second-Order logic that, from a computational perspective, captures finite-domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems (CSPs) modulo polynomial-time reductions. At the same time, MMSNP…
Local search algorithms for NP-hard problems such as Max-Cut frequently perform much better in practice than worst-case analysis suggests. Smoothed analysis has proved an effective approach to understanding this: a substantial literature…
We develop simple and general techniques to obtain faster (near-linear time) static approximation algorithms, as well as efficient dynamic data structures, for four fundamental geometric optimization problems: minimum piercing set (MPS),…
We study approximation algorithms for the socially fair $(\ell_p, k)$-clustering problem with $m$ groups, whose special cases include the socially fair $k$-median ($p=1$) and socially fair $k$-means ($p=2$) problems. We present (1) a…
Parameterized complexity theory has enabled a refined classification of the difficulty of NP-hard optimization problems on graphs with respect to key structural properties, and so to a better understanding of their true difficulties. More…
A fundamental issue in real-world systems, such as sensor networks, is the selection of observations which most effectively reduce uncertainty. More specifically, we address the long standing problem of nonmyopically selecting the most…
We initiate the study of approximation algorithms and computational barriers for constructing sparse $\alpha$-navigable graphs [IX23, DGM+24], a core primitive underlying recent advances in graph-based nearest neighbor search. Given an…
The fundamental sparsest cut problem takes as input a graph $G$ together with the edge costs and demands, and seeks a cut that minimizes the ratio between the costs and demands across the cuts. For $n$-node graphs~$G$ of treewidth~$k$,…
We study techniques for solving the Maximum Satisfiability problem (MaxSAT). Our focus is on variables of degree 4. We identify cases for degree-4 variables and show how the resolution principle and the kernelization techniques can be…
Packing problems are an important class of optimization problems. The probably most well-known problem if this type is knapsack and many generalizations of it have been studied in the literature like Two-dimensional Geometric Knapsack…
The Parameterized Inapproximability Hypothesis (PIH), which is an analog of the PCP theorem in parameterized complexity, asserts that, there is a constant $\varepsilon> 0$ such that for any computable function $f:\mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{N}$,…