Related papers: Fixed-parameter complexity of semantics for logic …
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…
We introduce a parallel machine scheduling problem in which the processing times of jobs are not given in advance but are determined by a system of linear constraints. The objective is to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum job…
For a family of graphs $\mathcal{G}$, the $\mathcal{G}$-\textsc{Contraction} problem takes as an input a graph $G$ and an integer $k$, and the goal is to decide if there exists $F \subseteq E(G)$ of size at most $k$ such that $G/F$ belongs…
We study the complexity of the problem of searching for a set of patterns that separate two given sets of strings. This problem has applications in a wide variety of areas, most notably in data mining, computational biology, and in…
Here we study the NP-complete $K$-SAT problem. Although the worst-case complexity of NP-complete problems is conjectured to be exponential, there exist parametrized random ensembles of problems where solutions can typically be found in…
Algorithms for learning decision trees often include heuristic local-search operations such as (1) adjusting the threshold of a cut or (2) also exchanging the feature of that cut. We study minimizing the number of classification errors by…
Given a text and a pattern over two types of symbols called constants and variables, the parameterized pattern matching problem is to find all occurrences of substrings of the text that the pattern matches by substituting a variable in the…
The NP-hard general factor problem asks, given a graph and for each vertex a list of integers, whether the graph has a spanning subgraph where each vertex has a degree that belongs to its assigned list. The problem remains NP-hard even if…
We convert, within polynomial-time and sequential processing, NP-Complete Problems into a problem of deciding feasibility of a given system S of linear equations with constants and coefficients of binary-variables that are 0, 1, or -1. S is…
We study the linearizability monitoring problem, which asks whether a given concurrent history of a data structure is equivalent to some sequential execution of the same data structure. In general, this problem is $\textsf{NP}$-hard, even…
Scheduling problems are fundamental in combinatorial optimization. Much work has been done on approximation algorithms for NP-hard cases, but relatively little is known about exact solutions when some part of the input is a fixed parameter.…
An important area of combinatorial optimization is the study of packing and covering problems, such as Bin Packing, Multiple Knapsack, and Bin Covering. Those problems have been studied extensively from the viewpoint of approximation…
This paper studies the computational complexity of a robust variant of a two-stage submodular minimization problem that we call Robust Submodular Minimizer. In this problem, we are given $k$ submodular functions~$f_1,\dots,f_k$ over a set…
Parametric linear systems are linear systems of equations in which some symbolic parameters, that is, symbols that are not considered to be candidates for elimination or solution in the course of analyzing the problem, appear in the…
Powerful results from the theory of integer programming have recently led to substantial advances in parameterized complexity. However, our perception is that, except for Lenstra's algorithm for solving integer linear programming in fixed…
Symmetries occur naturally in CSP or SAT problems and are not very difficult to discover, but using them to prune the search space tends to be very challenging. Indeed, this usually requires finding specific elements in a group of…
Let $G$ be a graph such that each vertex has its list of available colors, and assume that each list is a subset of the common set consisting of $k$ colors. For two given list colorings of $G$, we study the problem of transforming one into…
We carry out a systematic study of a natural covering problem, used for identification across several areas, in the realm of parameterized complexity. In the {\sc Test Cover} problem we are given a set $[n]=\{1,...,n\}$ of items together…
Given an undirected graph $G$, a collection $\{(s_1,t_1),..., (s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of vertices, and an integer $p$, the Edge Multicut problem ask if there is a set $S$ of at most $p$ edges such that the removal of $S$ disconnects every…
Motivated by questions in robust control and switched linear dynamical systems, we consider the problem checking whether all convex combinations of k matrices in R^{n x n} are stable. In particular, we are interested whether there exist…