21,112 research outputs found
Determinant Sums for Undirected Hamiltonicity
We present a Monte Carlo algorithm for Hamiltonicity detection in an
-vertex undirected graph running in time. To the best of
our knowledge, this is the first superpolynomial improvement on the worst case
runtime for the problem since the bound established for TSP almost
fifty years ago (Bellman 1962, Held and Karp 1962). It answers in part the
first open problem in Woeginger's 2003 survey on exact algorithms for NP-hard
problems.
For bipartite graphs, we improve the bound to time. Both the
bipartite and the general algorithm can be implemented to use space polynomial
in .
We combine several recently resurrected ideas to get the results. Our main
technical contribution is a new reduction inspired by the algebraic sieving
method for -Path (Koutis ICALP 2008, Williams IPL 2009). We introduce the
Labeled Cycle Cover Sum in which we are set to count weighted arc labeled cycle
covers over a finite field of characteristic two. We reduce Hamiltonicity to
Labeled Cycle Cover Sum and apply the determinant summation technique for Exact
Set Covers (Bj\"orklund STACS 2010) to evaluate it.Comment: To appear at IEEE FOCS 201
-Approximation Algorithm for Directed Steiner Tree: A Tight Quasi-Polynomial-Time Algorithm
In the Directed Steiner Tree (DST) problem we are given an -vertex
directed edge-weighted graph, a root , and a collection of terminal
nodes. Our goal is to find a minimum-cost arborescence that contains a directed
path from to every terminal. We present an -approximation algorithm for DST that runs in
quasi-polynomial-time. By adjusting the parameters in the hardness result of
Halperin and Krauthgamer, we show the matching lower bound of
for the class of quasi-polynomial-time
algorithms. This is the first improvement on the DST problem since the
classical quasi-polynomial-time approximation algorithm by
Charikar et al. (The paper erroneously claims an approximation due
to a mistake in prior work.)
Our approach is based on two main ingredients. First, we derive an
approximation preserving reduction to the Label-Consistent Subtree (LCST)
problem. The LCST instance has quasi-polynomial size and logarithmic height. We
remark that, in contrast, Zelikovsky's heigh-reduction theorem used in all
prior work on DST achieves a reduction to a tree instance of the related Group
Steiner Tree (GST) problem of similar height, however losing a logarithmic
factor in the approximation ratio. Our second ingredient is an LP-rounding
algorithm to approximately solve LCST instances, which is inspired by the
framework developed by Rothvo{\ss}. We consider a Sherali-Adams lifting of a
proper LP relaxation of LCST. Our rounding algorithm proceeds level by level
from the root to the leaves, rounding and conditioning each time on a proper
subset of label variables. A small enough (namely, polylogarithmic) number of
Sherali-Adams lifting levels is sufficient to condition up to the leaves
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