Related papers: The Sharp Power Law of Local Search on Expanders
We consider the quantum query complexity of local search as a function of graph geometry. Given a graph $G = (V,E)$ with $n$ vertices and black box access to a function $f : V \to \mathbb{R}$, the goal is find a vertex $v$ that is a local…
Local search is a powerful heuristic in optimization and computer science, the complexity of which has been studied in the white box and black box models. In the black box model, we are given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and oracle access to a…
Let G=(V,E) be a finite graph, and f:V->N be any function. The Local Search problem consists in finding a local minimum of the function f on G, that is a vertex v such that f(v) is not larger than the value of f on the neighbors of v in G.…
We study the problem of \emph{local search} on a graph. Given a real-valued black-box function f on the graph's vertices, this is the problem of determining a local minimum of f--a vertex v for which f(v) is no more than f evaluated at any…
Local Search problem, which finds a local minimum of a black-box function on a given graph, is of both practical and theoretical importance to combinatorial optimization, complexity theory and many other areas in theoretical computer…
We analyze the query complexity of finding a local minimum in $t$ rounds on general graphs. More precisely, given a graph $G = (V,E)$ and oracle access to an unknown function $f : V \to \mathbb{R}$, the goal is to find a local minimum--a…
The Local Search problem, which finds a local minimum of a black-box function on a given graph, is of both practical and theoretical importance to many areas in computer science and natural sciences. In this paper, we show that for the…
The Minimum Vertex Cover (MinVC) problem is a well-known NP-hard problem. Recently there has been great interest in solving this problem on real-world massive graphs. For such graphs, local search is a promising approach to finding optimal…
Constructing a spanning tree of a graph is one of the most basic tasks in graph theory. We consider a relaxed version of this problem in the setting of local algorithms. The relaxation is that the constructed subgraph is a sparse spanning…
We consider the query complexity of finding a local minimum of a function defined on a graph. This abstract problem is fundamental to many optimization tasks, such as finding a local minimum of the loss function when training deep neural…
Very recently, Khoury and Schild [FOCS 2025] showed that any randomized LOCAL algorithm that solves maximal matching requires $\Omega(\min\{\log \Delta, \log_\Delta n\})$ rounds, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph and $\Delta$ is…
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}},…
In this work, we present a fast distributed algorithm for local potential problems: these are graph problems where the task is to find a locally optimal solution where no node can unilaterally improve the utility in its local neighborhood…
Graph Balancing is the problem of orienting the edges of a weighted multigraph so as to minimize the maximum weighted in-degree. Since the introduction of the problem the best algorithm known achieves an approximation ratio of $1.75$ and it…
We study \emph{local computation algorithms (LCAs)} for constructing spanning trees. In this setting, the goal is to locally determine, for each edge $ e \in E $, whether it belongs to a spanning tree $ T $ of the input graph $ G $, where $…
In network analysis and graph mining, closeness centrality is a popular measure to infer the importance of a vertex. Computing closeness efficiently for individual vertices received considerable attention. The NP-hard problem of group…
The expansion of a hypergraph, a natural extension of the notion of expansion in graphs, is defined as the minimum over all cuts in the hypergraph of the ratio of the number of the hyperedges cut to the size of the smaller side of the cut.…
Suppose a target is hidden in one of the vertices of an edge-weighted graph according to a known probability distribution. The expanding search problem asks for a search sequence of the vertices so as to minimize the expected time for…
We show that a simple local search gives a PTAS for the Feedback Vertex Set (FVS) problem in minor-free graphs. An efficient PTAS in minor-free graphs was known for this problem by Fomin, Lokshtanov, Raman and Sauraubh. However, their…
Can Grover's algorithm speed up search of a physical region - for example a 2-D grid of size sqrt(n) by sqrt(n)? The problem is that sqrt(n) time seems to be needed for each query, just to move amplitude across the grid. Here we show that…