Related papers: The Sharp Power Law of Local Search on Expanders
The main goal in distributed symmetry-breaking is to understand the locality of problems; i.e., the radius of the neighborhood that a node needs to explore in order to arrive at its part of a global solution. In this work, we study the…
Many combinatorial optimization problems can be approximated within $(1 \pm \epsilon)$ factors in $\text{poly}(\log n, 1/\epsilon)$ rounds in the LOCAL model via network decompositions [Ghaffari, Kuhn, and Maus, STOC 2018]. These approaches…
In a recent work, Esmer et al. describe a simple method - Approximate Monotone Local Search - to obtain exponential approximation algorithms from existing parameterized exact algorithms, polynomial-time approximation algorithms and, more…
It is an easy observation that a natural greedy approach yields a $\left(d-O(1)\right)$-factor approximation algorithm for the maximum induced matching problem in $d$-regular graphs. The only considerable and non-trivial improvement of this…
We consider the following generalization of the classic Binary Search Problem: a searcher is required to find a hidden target vertex $x$ in a graph $G$, by iteratively performing queries about vertices. A query to $v$ incurs a cost $c(v,…
We present a complete classification of the distributed computational complexity of local optimization problems in directed cycles for both the deterministic and the randomized LOCAL model. We show that for any local optimization problem…
Constructing a sparse spanning subgraph is a fundamental primitive in graph theory. In this paper, we study this problem in the Centralized Local model, where the goal is to decide whether an edge is part of the spanning subgraph by…
In graph sparsification, the goal has almost always been of {global} nature: compress a graph into a smaller subgraph ({sparsifier}) that maintains certain features of the original graph. Algorithms can then run on the sparsifier, which in…
Dominating Set is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem which finds application in computational biology or mobile communication. Because of its $\mathrm{NP}$-hardness, one often turns to heuristics for good solutions. Many such…
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…
In the Upper Degree-Constrained Partial Orientation problem we are given an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$, together with two degree constraint functions $d^-,d^+ : V \to \mathbb{N}$. The goal is to orient as many edges as possible, in such a…
We present a general technique, based on parametric search with some twist, for solving a variety of optimization problems on a set of semi-algebraic geometric objects of constant complexity. The common feature of these problems is that…
Given a graph $G = (V,E)$, an $(\alpha, \beta)$-ruling set is a subset $S \subseteq V$ such that the distance between any two vertices in $S$ is at least $\alpha$, and the distance between any vertex in $V$ and the closest vertex in $S$ is…
The Local Computation Algorithm (LCA) model is a popular model in the field of sublinear-time algorithms that measures the complexity of an algorithm by the number of probes the algorithm makes in the neighborhood of one node to determine…
We tackle two long-standing problems related to re-expansions in heuristic search algorithms. For graph search, A* can require $\Omega(2^{n})$ expansions, where $n$ is the number of states within the final $f$ bound. Existing algorithms…
In the NP-hard Max $c$-Cut problem, one is given an undirected edge-weighted graph $G$ and aims to color the vertices of $G$ with $c$ colors such that the total weight of edges with distinctly colored endpoints is maximal. The case with…
One powerful technique to solve NP-hard optimization problems in practice is branch-and-reduce search---which is branch-and-bound that intermixes branching with reductions to decrease the input size. While this technique is known to be very…
The local minimum degree of a graph is the minimum degree that can be reached by means of local complementation. For any n, there exist graphs of order n which have a local minimum degree at least 0.189n, or at least 0.110n when restricted…
We give a nearly optimal sublinear-time algorithm for approximating the size of a minimum vertex cover in a graph G. The algorithm may query the degree deg(v) of any vertex v of its choice, and for each 1 <= i <= deg(v), it may ask for the…
Local search is a fundamental optimization technique that is both widely used in practice and deeply studied in theory, yet its computational complexity remains poorly understood. The traditional frameworks, PLS and the standard algorithm…