Directed Steiner Tree and the Lasserre Hierarchy

The goal for the Directed Steiner Tree problem is to find a minimum cost tree in a directed graph G=(V,E) that connects all terminals X to a given root r. It is well known that modulo a logarithmic factor it suffices to consider acyclic graphs where the nodes are arranged in L <= log |X| levels. Unfortunately the natural LP formulation has a |X|^(1/2) integrality gap already for 5 levels. We show that for every L, the O(L)-round Lasserre Strengthening of this LP has integrality gap O(L log |X|). This provides a polynomial time |X|^{epsilon}-approximation and a O(log^3 |X|) approximation in O(n^{log |X|) time, matching the best known approximation guarantee obtained by a greedy algorithm of Charikar et al.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur

Integrality gaps of semidefinite programs for Vertex Cover and relations to ℓ1\ell_1 embeddability of Negative Type metrics

We study various SDP formulations for {\sc Vertex Cover} by adding different constraints to the standard formulation. We show that {\sc Vertex Cover} cannot be approximated better than $2-o(1)$ even when we add the so called pentagonal inequality constraints to the standard SDP formulation, en route answering an open question of Karakostas~\cite{Karakostas}. We further show the surprising fact that by strengthening the SDP with the (intractable) requirement that the metric interpretation of the solution is an $\ell_1$ metric, we get an exact relaxation (integrality gap is 1), and on the other hand if the solution is arbitrarily close to being $\ell_1$ embeddable, the integrality gap may be as big as $2-o(1)$. Finally, inspired by the above findings, we use ideas from the integrality gap construction of Charikar \cite{Char02} to provide a family of simple examples for negative type metrics that cannot be embedded into $\ell_1$ with distortion better than 8/7-\eps. To this end we prove a new isoperimetric inequality for the hypercube.Comment: A more complete version. Changed order of results. A complete proof of (current) Theorem

Towards strong nonapproximability results in the Lovasz-Schrijver hierarchy

hierarch

Interactive proof system variants and approximation algorithms for optical networks

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-121).by Ravi Sundaram.Ph.D

Proceedings of the 26th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS'09)

The Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS) is held alternately in France and in Germany. The conference of February 26-28, 2009, held in Freiburg, is the 26th in this series. Previous meetings took place in Paris (1984), Saarbr¨ucken (1985), Orsay (1986), Passau (1987), Bordeaux (1988), Paderborn (1989), Rouen (1990), Hamburg (1991), Cachan (1992), W¨urzburg (1993), Caen (1994), M¨unchen (1995), Grenoble (1996), L¨ubeck (1997), Paris (1998), Trier (1999), Lille (2000), Dresden (2001), Antibes (2002), Berlin (2003), Montpellier (2004), Stuttgart (2005), Marseille (2006), Aachen (2007), and Bordeaux (2008). ..