Related papers: Paths Beyond Local Search: A Nearly Tight Bound fo…
Randomized search heuristics such as evolutionary algorithms, simulated annealing, and ant colony optimization are a broadly used class of general-purpose algorithms. Analyzing them via classical methods of theoretical computer science is a…
We study popular local search and greedy algorithms for scheduling. The performance guarantee of these algorithms is well understood, but the worst-case lower bounds seem somewhat contrived and it is questionable if they arise in practical…
The class PLS (Polynomial Local Search) captures the complexity of finding a solution that is locally optimal and has proven to be an important concept in the theory of local search. It has been shown that local search versions of various…
A recently introduced general-purpose heuristic for finding high-quality solutions for many hard optimization problems is reviewed. The method is inspired by recent progress in understanding far-from-equilibrium phenomena in terms of {\em…
We study the problem of estimating the number of edges in an unknown graph. We consider a hybrid model in which an algorithm may issue independent set, degree, and neighbor queries. We show that this model admits strictly more efficient…
We prove lower bounds on the complexity of finding $\epsilon$-stationary points (points $x$ such that $\|\nabla f(x)\| \le \epsilon$) of smooth, high-dimensional, and potentially non-convex functions $f$. We consider oracle-based complexity…
Bayesian optimization offers a flexible framework to optimize an objective function that is expensive to be evaluated. A Bayesian optimizer iteratively queries the function values on its carefully selected points. Subsequently, it makes a…
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…
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…
We propose greedy and local search algorithms for rank-constrained convex optimization, namely solving $\underset{\mathrm{rank}(A)\leq r^*}{\min}\, R(A)$ given a convex function $R:\mathbb{R}^{m\times n}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ and a…
What is the effectiveness of local search algorithms for geometric problems in the plane? We prove that local search with neighborhoods of magnitude $1/\epsilon^c$ is an approximation scheme for the following problems in the Euclidian…
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…
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…
The Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) has emerged as a promising variational quantum algorithm for addressing NP hard combinatorial optimization problems. However, a significant limitation lies in optimizing its classical…
This paper considers the fixed point problem for a nonexpansive mapping on a real Hilbert space and proposes novel line search fixed point algorithms to accelerate the search. The termination conditions for the line search are based on the…
Greedy algorithms have been successfully analyzed and applied in training neural networks for solving variational problems, ensuring guaranteed convergence orders. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the orthogonal greedy algorithm…
We prove that the Bounded Occurrence Ordering k-CSP Problem is not approximation resistant. We give a very simple local search algorithm that always performs better than the random assignment algorithm. Specifically, the expected value of…
Consider a graph problem that is locally checkable but not locally solvable: given a solution we can check that it is feasible by verifying all constant-radius neighborhoods, but to find a solution each node needs to explore the input graph…
When looking for a solution, deterministic methods have the enormous advantage that they do find global optima. Unfortunately, they are very CPU-intensive, and are useless on untractable NP-hard problems that would require thousands of…
In stochastic optimization, particularly in evolutionary computation and reinforcement learning, the optimization of a function $f: \Omega \to \mathbb{R}$ is often addressed through optimizing a so-called relaxation $\theta \in \Theta…