250 research outputs found
Small Extended Formulation for Knapsack Cover Inequalities from Monotone Circuits
Initially developed for the min-knapsack problem, the knapsack cover
inequalities are used in the current best relaxations for numerous
combinatorial optimization problems of covering type. In spite of their
widespread use, these inequalities yield linear programming (LP) relaxations of
exponential size, over which it is not known how to optimize exactly in
polynomial time. In this paper we address this issue and obtain LP relaxations
of quasi-polynomial size that are at least as strong as that given by the
knapsack cover inequalities.
For the min-knapsack cover problem, our main result can be stated formally as
follows: for any , there is a -size LP relaxation with an integrality gap of at most ,
where is the number of items. Prior to this work, there was no known
relaxation of subexponential size with a constant upper bound on the
integrality gap.
Our construction is inspired by a connection between extended formulations
and monotone circuit complexity via Karchmer-Wigderson games. In particular,
our LP is based on -depth monotone circuits with fan-in~ for
evaluating weighted threshold functions with inputs, as constructed by
Beimel and Weinreb. We believe that a further understanding of this connection
may lead to more positive results complementing the numerous lower bounds
recently proved for extended formulations.Comment: 21 page
Lifting Linear Extension Complexity Bounds to the Mixed-Integer Setting
Mixed-integer mathematical programs are among the most commonly used models
for a wide set of problems in Operations Research and related fields. However,
there is still very little known about what can be expressed by small
mixed-integer programs. In particular, prior to this work, it was open whether
some classical problems, like the minimum odd-cut problem, can be expressed by
a compact mixed-integer program with few (even constantly many) integer
variables. This is in stark contrast to linear formulations, where recent
breakthroughs in the field of extended formulations have shown that many
polytopes associated to classical combinatorial optimization problems do not
even admit approximate extended formulations of sub-exponential size.
We provide a general framework for lifting inapproximability results of
extended formulations to the setting of mixed-integer extended formulations,
and obtain almost tight lower bounds on the number of integer variables needed
to describe a variety of classical combinatorial optimization problems. Among
the implications we obtain, we show that any mixed-integer extended formulation
of sub-exponential size for the matching polytope, cut polytope, traveling
salesman polytope or dominant of the odd-cut polytope, needs many integer variables, where is the number of vertices of the
underlying graph. Conversely, the above-mentioned polyhedra admit
polynomial-size mixed-integer formulations with only or (for the traveling salesman polytope) many integer variables.
Our results build upon a new decomposition technique that, for any convex set
, allows for approximating any mixed-integer description of by the
intersection of with the union of a small number of affine subspaces.Comment: A conference version of this paper will be presented at SODA 201
Polyhedral techniques in combinatorial optimization II: computations
Combinatorial optimization problems appear in many disciplines ranging from management and logistics to mathematics, physics, and chemistry. These problems are usually relatively easy to formulate mathematically, but most of them are computationally hard due to the restriction that a subset of the variables have to take integral values. During the last two decades there has been a remarkable progress in techniques based on the polyhedral description of combinatorial problems. leading to a large increase in the size of several problem types that can be solved. The basic idea behind polyhedral techniques is to derive a good linear formulation of the set of solutions by identifying linear inequalities that can be proved to be necessary in the description of the convex hull of feasible solutions. Ideally we can then solve the problem as a linear programming problem, which can be done efficiently. The purpose of this manuscript is to give an overview of the developments in polyhedral theory, starting with the pioneering work by Dantzig, Fulkerson and Johnson on the traveling salesman problem, and by Gomory on integer programming. We also present some modern applications, and computational experience
Exponential Lower Bounds for Polytopes in Combinatorial Optimization
We solve a 20-year old problem posed by Yannakakis and prove that there
exists no polynomial-size linear program (LP) whose associated polytope
projects to the traveling salesman polytope, even if the LP is not required to
be symmetric. Moreover, we prove that this holds also for the cut polytope and
the stable set polytope. These results were discovered through a new connection
that we make between one-way quantum communication protocols and semidefinite
programming reformulations of LPs.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures. This version of the paper will appear in the
Journal of the ACM. The earlier conference version in STOC'12 had the title
"Linear vs. Semidefinite Extended Formulations: Exponential Separation and
Strong Lower Bounds
Polyhedral techniques in combinatorial optimization II: applications and computations
The polyhedral approach is one of the most powerful techniques available for solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. The main idea behind the technique is to consider the linear relaxation of the integer combinatorial optimization problem, and try to iteratively strengthen the linear formulation by adding violated strong valid inequalities, i.e., inequalities that are violated by the current fractional solution but satisfied by all feasible solutions, and that define high-dimensional faces, preferably facets, of the convex hull of feasible solutions. If we have the complete description of the convex hull of feasible solutions at hand all extreme points of this formulation are integral, which means that we can solve the problem as a linear programming problem. Linear programming problems are known to be computationally easy. In Part 1 of this article we discuss theoretical aspects of polyhedral techniques. Here we will mainly concentrate on the computational aspects. In particular we discuss how polyhedral results are used in cutting plane algorithms. We also consider a few theoretical issues not treated in Part 1, such as techniques for proving that a certain inequality is facet defining, and that a certain linear formulation gives a complete description of the convex hull of feasible solutions. We conclude the article by briefly mentioning some alternative techniques for solving combinatorial optimization problems
Polynomiality for Bin Packing with a Constant Number of Item Types
We consider the bin packing problem with d different item sizes s_i and item
multiplicities a_i, where all numbers are given in binary encoding. This
problem formulation is also known as the 1-dimensional cutting stock problem.
In this work, we provide an algorithm which, for constant d, solves bin
packing in polynomial time. This was an open problem for all d >= 3.
In fact, for constant d our algorithm solves the following problem in
polynomial time: given two d-dimensional polytopes P and Q, find the smallest
number of integer points in P whose sum lies in Q.
Our approach also applies to high multiplicity scheduling problems in which
the number of copies of each job type is given in binary encoding and each type
comes with certain parameters such as release dates, processing times and
deadlines. We show that a variety of high multiplicity scheduling problems can
be solved in polynomial time if the number of job types is constant
Coresets for Clustering with General Assignment Constraints
Designing small-sized \emph{coresets}, which approximately preserve the costs
of the solutions for large datasets, has been an important research direction
for the past decade. We consider coreset construction for a variety of general
constrained clustering problems. We significantly extend and generalize the
results of a very recent paper (Braverman et al., FOCS'22), by demonstrating
that the idea of hierarchical uniform sampling (Chen, SICOMP'09; Braverman et
al., FOCS'22) can be applied to efficiently construct coresets for a very
general class of constrained clustering problems with general assignment
constraints, including capacity constraints on cluster centers, and assignment
structure constraints for data points (modeled by a convex body .
Our main theorem shows that a small-sized -coreset exists as long
as a complexity measure of the structure
constraint, and the \emph{covering exponent}
for metric space are bounded. The complexity measure
for convex body is the Lipschitz
constant of a certain transportation problem constrained in ,
called \emph{optimal assignment transportation problem}. We prove nontrivial
upper bounds of for various polytopes, including
the general matroid basis polytopes, and laminar matroid polytopes (with better
bound). As an application of our general theorem, we construct the first
coreset for the fault-tolerant clustering problem (with or without capacity
upper/lower bound) for the above metric spaces, in which the fault-tolerance
requirement is captured by a uniform matroid basis polytope
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