Related papers: New constructions for covering designs
A high number of discrete optimization problems, including Vertex Cover, Set Cover or Feedback Vertex Set, can be unified into the class of covering problems. Several of them were shown to be inapproximable by deterministic algorithms. This…
We introduce a sorting machine consisting of $k+1$ stacks in series: the first $k$ stacks can only contain elements in decreasing order from top to bottom, while the last one has the opposite restriction. This device generalizes \cite{SM},…
Nearly perfect packing codes are those codes that meet the Johnson upper bound on the size of error-correcting codes. This bound is an improvement to the sphere-packing bound. A related bound for covering codes is known as the van Wee…
The setting of projective systems can be used to study the parameters of a projective linear code $\mathcal{C}$. This can be done by considering the intersections of the point set $\Omega$ defined by the columns of a generating matrix for…
This paper describes a simple greedy D-approximation algorithm for any covering problem whose objective function is submodular and non-decreasing, and whose feasible region can be expressed as the intersection of arbitrary (closed upwards)…
Tokenization is the process of encoding strings into tokens of a fixed vocabulary size, and is widely utilized in Natural Language Processing applications. The leading tokenization algorithm today is Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE), which…
We give improved lower bounds for binary $3$-query locally correctable codes (3-LCCs) $C \colon \{0,1\}^k \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$. Specifically, we prove: (1) If $C$ is a linear design 3-LCC, then $n \geq 2^{(1 - o(1))\sqrt{k} }$. A design…
We prove new upper bounds on the smallest size of affine blocking sets, that is, sets of points in a finite affine space that intersect every affine subspace of a fixed codimension. We show an equivalence between affine blocking sets with…
We give a nearly optimal sublinear-time algorithm for approximating the size of a minimum vertex cover in a graph G. The algorithm may query the degree deg(v) of any vertex v of its choice, and for each 1 <= i <= deg(v), it may ask for the…
We investigate the minimum number of cliques of orders $3$, $4$, and $5$ needed to cover the edges of $K_{33}$ with zero excess. General covering results yield the lower bound 57. The main result of the paper is that no decomposition of…
Our first focus is the Capacitated Partition Vertex Cover (C-PVC) problem in hypergraphs. In C-PVC, we are given a hypergraph with capacities on its vertices and a partition of the hyperedge set into $\omega$ distinct groups. The objective…
We present a new construction of high dimensional expanders based on covering spaces of simplicial complexes. High dimensional expanders (HDXs) are hypergraph analogues of expander graphs. They have many uses in theoretical computer…
We consider the minimum vertex cover problem in hypergraphs in which every hyperedge has size k (also known as minimum hitting set problem, or minimum set cover with element frequency k). Simple algorithms exist that provide…
Partial set cover problem and set multi-cover problem are two generalizations of set cover problem. In this paper, we consider the partial set multi-cover problem which is a combination of them: given an element set $E$, a collection of…
Narrow sieves, representative sets and divide-and-color are three breakthrough color coding-related techniques, which led to the design of extremely fast parameterized algorithms. We present a novel family of strategies for applying…
In the dynamic set cover problem, the input is a dynamic universe of elements and a fixed collection of sets. As elements are inserted or deleted, the goal is to efficiently maintain an approximate minimum set cover. While the past decade…
Let $ G=(V,E) $ be a simple graph of order $ n $ and size $ m $. A connected edge cover set of a graph is a subset $S$ of edges such that every vertex of the graph is incident to at least one edge of $S$ and the subgraph induced by $S$ is…
In the MINIMUM CONVEX COVER (MCC) problem, we are given a simple polygon $\mathcal P$ and an integer $k$, and the question is if there exist $k$ convex polygons whose union is $\mathcal P$. It is known that MCC is $\mathsf{NP}$-hard…
The spectrum of possible parameters of symmetric configurations is investigated. We both survey known constructions and results, and propose some new construction methods. Many new parameters are obtained, in particular for cyclic symmetric…
A $3$-partition of an $n$-element set $V$ is a triple of pairwise disjoint nonempty subsets $X,Y,Z$ such that $V=X\cup Y\cup Z$. We determine the minimum size $\varphi_3(n)$ of a set $\mathcal{E}$ of triples such that for every 3-partition…