111 research outputs found
Robust Assignments via Ear Decompositions and Randomized Rounding
Many real-life planning problems require making a priori decisions before all
parameters of the problem have been revealed. An important special case of such
problem arises in scheduling problems, where a set of tasks needs to be
assigned to the available set of machines or personnel (resources), in a way
that all tasks have assigned resources, and no two tasks share the same
resource. In its nominal form, the resulting computational problem becomes the
\emph{assignment problem} on general bipartite graphs.
This paper deals with a robust variant of the assignment problem modeling
situations where certain edges in the corresponding graph are \emph{vulnerable}
and may become unavailable after a solution has been chosen. The goal is to
choose a minimum-cost collection of edges such that if any vulnerable edge
becomes unavailable, the remaining part of the solution contains an assignment
of all tasks.
We present approximation results and hardness proofs for this type of
problems, and establish several connections to well-known concepts from
matching theory, robust optimization and LP-based techniques.Comment: Full version of ICALP 2016 pape
Block-Sparse Recovery via Convex Optimization
Given a dictionary that consists of multiple blocks and a signal that lives
in the range space of only a few blocks, we study the problem of finding a
block-sparse representation of the signal, i.e., a representation that uses the
minimum number of blocks. Motivated by signal/image processing and computer
vision applications, such as face recognition, we consider the block-sparse
recovery problem in the case where the number of atoms in each block is
arbitrary, possibly much larger than the dimension of the underlying subspace.
To find a block-sparse representation of a signal, we propose two classes of
non-convex optimization programs, which aim to minimize the number of nonzero
coefficient blocks and the number of nonzero reconstructed vectors from the
blocks, respectively. Since both classes of problems are NP-hard, we propose
convex relaxations and derive conditions under which each class of the convex
programs is equivalent to the original non-convex formulation. Our conditions
depend on the notions of mutual and cumulative subspace coherence of a
dictionary, which are natural generalizations of existing notions of mutual and
cumulative coherence. We evaluate the performance of the proposed convex
programs through simulations as well as real experiments on face recognition.
We show that treating the face recognition problem as a block-sparse recovery
problem improves the state-of-the-art results by 10% with only 25% of the
training data.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
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