Related papers: When Gravity Fails: Local Search Topology
Placement is crucial in the physical design, as it greatly affects power, performance, and area metrics. Recent advancements in analytical methods, such as DREAMPlace, have demonstrated impressive performance in global placement. However,…
Locally-biased graph algorithms are algorithms that attempt to find local or small-scale structure in a large data graph. In some cases, this can be accomplished by adding some sort of locality constraint and calling a traditional graph…
This paper is concerned with numerically finding a global solution of constrained optimal control problems with many local minima. The focus is on the optimal decentralized control (ODC) problem, whose feasible set is recently shown to have…
In scheduling problems, deterministic task durations are often assumed. This usually does not capture reality and may lead to schedules that are not robust to (small) changes to these task lengths. The use of stochastic task durations…
This paper investigates why it is beneficial, when solving a problem, to search in the neighbourhood of a current solution. The paper identifies properties of problems and neighbourhoods that support two novel proofs that neighbourhood…
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…
Combinatorial optimization problems can be mapped onto Ising models, and their ground state is generally difficult to find. A lot of heuristics for these problems have been proposed, and one promising approach is to use continuous…
Finding the ground state of Ising spin glasses is notoriously difficult due to disorder and frustration. Often, this challenge is framed as a combinatorial optimization problem, for which a common strategy employs simulated annealing, a…
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…
One of the challenges in optimization of high dimensional problems is finding appropriate solutions in a way that are as close as possible to the global optima. In this regard, one of the most common phenomena that occurs is the curse of…
Local search is an important class of incomplete algorithms for solving Distributed Constraint Optimization Problems (DCOPs) but it often converges to poor local optima. While Generalized Distributed Breakout Algorithm (GDBA) provides a…
Choice modellers routinely acknowledge the risk of convergence to inferior local optima when using structures other than a simple linear-in-parameters logit model. At the same time, there is no consensus on appropriate mechanisms for…
Anytime heuristic search algorithms try to find a (potentially suboptimal) solution as quickly as possible and then work to find better and better solutions until an optimal solution is obtained or time is exhausted. The most widely-known…
An overview of some methods of statistical physics applied to the analysis of algorithms for optimization problems (satisfiability of Boolean constraints, vertex cover of graphs, decoding, ...) with distributions of random inputs is…
Despite significant advances in characterizing the highly nonconvex landscapes of constraint satisfaction problems, the good performance of certain algorithms in solving hard combinatorial optimization tasks remains poorly understood. This…
Let G=(V,E) be a finite graph, and f:V->N be any function. The Local Search problem consists in finding a local minimum of the function f on G, that is a vertex v such that f(v) is not larger than the value of f on the neighbors of v in G.…
Due to the highly non-convex nature of large-scale robust parameter estimation, avoiding poor local minima is challenging in real-world applications where input data is contaminated by a large or unknown fraction of outliers. In this paper,…
We propose a unifying framework for smoothed analysis of combinatorial local optimization problems, and show how a diverse selection of problems within the complexity class PLS can be cast within this model. This abstraction allows us to…
The flexible job shop scheduling problem with sequencing flexibility and position-based learning effect is considered in the present work. In [K. A. G. Araujo, E. G. Birgin, and D. P. Ronconi, Technical Report MCDO02022024, 2024], models,…
In 1983, Aldous proved that randomization can speedup local search. For example, it reduces the query complexity of local search over [1:n]^d from Theta (n^{d-1}) to O (d^{1/2}n^{d/2}). It remains open whether randomization helps…