Related papers: Approximation thresholds for combinatorial optimiz…
Assuming that P is not equal to NP, the worst-case run time of any algorithm solving an NP-complete problem must be super-polynomial. But what is the fastest run time we can get? Before one can even hope to approach this question, a more…
The (Non-Preemptive) Throughput Maximization problem is a natural and fundamental scheduling problem. We are given $n$ jobs, where each job $j$ is characterized by a processing time and a time window, contained in a global interval $[0,T)$,…
In this paper, we define the reoptimization variant of the closest substring problem (CSP) under sequence addition. We show that, even with the additional information we have about the problem instance, the problem of finding a closest…
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is said to be \emph{approximation resistant} if it is hard to approximate better than the trivial algorithm which picks a uniformly random assignment. Assuming the Unique Games Conjecture, we give a…
The Bin Packing Problem is one of the most important Combinatorial Optimization problems in optimization and has a lot of real-world applications. Many approximation algorithms have been presented for this problem because of its NP-hard…
We present an approximation notion for NP-hard optimization problems represented by binary functions. We prove that (assuming P != NP) the new notion is strictly stronger than FPTAS, but strictly weaker than having a polynomial-time…
Polytrees are a subclass of Bayesian networks that seek to capture the conditional dependencies between a set of $n$ variables as a directed forest and are motivated by their more efficient inference and improved interpretability. Since the…
Maximum bipartite matching is a fundamental algorithmic problem which can be solved in polynomial time. We consider a natural variant in which there is a separation constraint: the vertices on one side lie on a path or a grid, and two…
In this paper we focus on problems which do not admit a constant-factor approximation in polynomial time and explore how quickly their approximability improves as the allowed running time is gradually increased from polynomial to…
We show that approximating the trace norm contraction coefficient of a quantum channel within a constant factor is NP-hard. Equivalently, this shows that determining the optimal success probability for encoding a bit in a quantum system…
Given a graph G, the {\em maximum internal spanning tree problem} (MIST for short) asks for computing a spanning tree T of G such that the number of internal vertices in T is maximized. MIST has possible applications in the design of…
In this paper, we introduce the Maximum Matrix Contraction problem, where we aim to contract as much as possible a binary matrix in order to maximize its density. We study the complexity and the polynomial approximability of the problem.…
Decision-theoretic troubleshooting is one of the areas to which Bayesian networks can be applied. Given a probabilistic model of a malfunctioning man-made device, the task is to construct a repair strategy with minimal expected cost. The…
We show that computing even very coarse approximations of critical points is intractable for simple classes of nonconvex functions. More concretely, we prove that if there exists a polynomial-time algorithm that takes as input a polynomial…
We present approximation algorithms for the following NP-hard optimization problems related to bottleneck spanning trees in metric spaces. 1. The disjoint bottleneck spanning tree problem: Given $n$ pairs of points in a metric space, find…
We present a class of linear programming approximations for constrained optimization problems. In the case of mixed-integer polynomial optimization problems, if the intersection graph of the constraints has bounded tree-width our…
Many researchers in artificial intelligence are beginning to explore the use of soft constraints to express a set of (possibly conflicting) problem requirements. A soft constraint is a function defined on a collection of variables which…
The seminar assignment problem is a variant of the generalized assignment problem in which items have unit size and the amount of space allowed in each bin is restricted to an arbitrary set of values. The problem has been shown to be…
We study optimization problems that are neither approximable in polynomial time (at least with a constant factor) nor fixed parameter tractable, under widely believed complexity assumptions. Specifically, we focus on Maximum Independent…
Polynomial approximations of functions are widely used in scientific computing. In certain applications, it is often desired to require the polynomial approximation to be non-negative (resp. non-positive), or bounded within a given range,…