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Given a graph, the general problem to cover the maximum number of vertices by a collection of vertex-disjoint long paths seemingly escapes from the literature. A path containing at least $k$ vertices is considered long. When $k \le 3$, the…
The $k$-opt algorithm is one of the simplest and most widely used heuristics for solving the traveling salesman problem. Starting from an arbitrary tour, the $k$-opt algorithm improves the current tour in each iteration by exchanging up to…
One might argue that solving a trajectory optimization problem over a million grid points is preposterous. How about solving such a problem at an incredibly fast computational time? On a small form-factor processor? Algorithmic details that…
We provide a general framework for getting expected linear time constant factor approximations (and in many cases FPTASs) to several well-known problems in Computational Geometry, such as $k$-center clustering and farthest nearest neighbor.…
We consider worst case time bounds for NP-complete problems including 3-SAT, 3-coloring, 3-edge-coloring, and 3-list-coloring. Our algorithms are based on a constraint satisfaction (CSP) formulation of these problems; 3-SAT is equivalent to…
We study the Heilbronn triangle problem, which involves placing n points in the unit square such that the minimum area of any triangle formed by these points is maximized. A straightforward maximin formulation of this problem is highly…
Given a set $P$ of $n$ points in $\mathbf{R}^d$, and a positive integer $k \leq n$, the $k$-dispersion problem is that of selecting $k$ of the given points so that the minimum inter-point distance among them is maximized (under Euclidean…
We study extensions of the classic \emph{Line Cover} problem, which asks whether a set of $n$ points in the plane can be covered using $k$ lines. Line Cover is known to be NP-hard, and we focus on two natural generalizations. The first is…
In this paper, we give a conditional lower bound of $n^{\Omega(k)}$ on running time for the classic k-median and k-means clustering objectives (where n is the size of the input), even in low-dimensional Euclidean space of dimension four,…
By creating some new concepts and methods: checking tree, long unit path, direct contradiction unit pair, indirect contradiction unit pair, additional contradiction unit pair, 2-unit layer and 3-unit layer, redundant units, and destroying…
In this paper, we consider three hitting problems on a disk intersection graph: Triangle Hitting Set, Feedback Vertex Set, and Odd Cycle Transversal. Given a disk intersection graph $G$, our goal is to compute a set of vertices hitting all…
In the \emph{$k$-Diameter-Optimally Augmenting Tree Problem} we are given a tree $T$ of $n$ vertices as input. The tree is embedded in an unknown \emph{metric} space and we have unlimited access to an oracle that, given two distinct…
$k$-defective cliques relax cliques by allowing up-to $k$ missing edges from being a complete graph. This relaxation enables us to find larger near-cliques and has applications in link prediction, cluster detection, social network analysis…
The Knapsack problem is one of the most fundamental NP-complete problems at the intersection of computer science, optimization, and operations research. A recent line of research worked towards understanding the complexity of…
The $k$-mismatch problem consists in computing the Hamming distance between a pattern $P$ of length $m$ and every length-$m$ substring of a text $T$ of length $n$, if this distance is no more than $k$. In many real-world applications, any…
Given a finite metric space $(X\cup Y, \mathbf{d})$ the $k$-median problem is to find a set of $k$ centers $C\subseteq Y$ that minimizes $\sum_{p\in X} \min_{c\in C} \mathbf{d}(p,c)$. In general metrics, the best polynomial time algorithm…
We devise an algorithm that approximately computes the number of paths of length $k$ in a given directed graph with $n$ vertices up to a multiplicative error of $1 \pm \varepsilon$. Our algorithm runs in time $\varepsilon^{-2} 4^k(n+m)…
We study a large family of graph covering problems, whose definitions rely on distances, for graphs of bounded cyclomatic number (that is, the minimum number of edges that need to be removed from the graph to destroy all cycles). These…
The \textsc{Co-Path/Cycle Packing} problem (resp. The \textsc{Co-Path Packing} problem) asks whether we can delete at most $k$ vertices from the input graph such that the remaining graph is a collection of induced paths and cycles (resp.…
We consider the well-studied Sparse Fourier transform problem, where one aims to quickly recover an approximately Fourier $k$-sparse vector $\widehat{x} \in \mathbb{C}^{n^d}$ from observing its time domain representation $x$. In the exact…