570 research outputs found
Acyclic orientations with path constraints
Many well-known combinatorial optimization problems can be stated over the
set of acyclic orientations of an undirected graph. For example, acyclic
orientations with certain diameter constraints are closely related to the
optimal solutions of the vertex coloring and frequency assignment problems. In
this paper we introduce a linear programming formulation of acyclic
orientations with path constraints, and discuss its use in the solution of the
vertex coloring problem and some versions of the frequency assignment problem.
A study of the polytope associated with the formulation is presented, including
proofs of which constraints of the formulation are facet-defining and the
introduction of new classes of valid inequalities
On the complexity of the multiple stack TSP, kSTSP
The multiple Stack Travelling Salesman Problem, STSP, deals with the collect
and the deliverance of n commodities in two distinct cities. The two cities are
represented by means of two edge-valued graphs (G1,d2) and (G2,d2). During the
pick-up tour, the commodities are stored into a container whose rows are
subject to LIFO constraints. As a generalisation of standard TSP, the problem
obviously is NP-hard; nevertheless, one could wonder about what combinatorial
structure of STSP does the most impact its complexity: the arrangement of the
commodities into the container, or the tours themselves? The answer is not
clear. First, given a pair (T1,T2) of pick-up and delivery tours, it is
polynomial to decide whether these tours are or not compatible. Second, for a
given arrangement of the commodities into the k rows of the container, the
optimum pick-up and delivery tours w.r.t. this arrangement can be computed
within a time that is polynomial in n, but exponential in k. Finally, we
provide instances on which a tour that is optimum for one of three distances
d1, d2 or d1+d2 lead to solutions of STSP that are arbitrarily far to the
optimum STSP
An Improved Private Mechanism for Small Databases
We study the problem of answering a workload of linear queries ,
on a database of size at most drawn from a universe
under the constraint of (approximate) differential privacy.
Nikolov, Talwar, and Zhang~\cite{NTZ} proposed an efficient mechanism that, for
any given and , answers the queries with average error that is
at most a factor polynomial in and
worse than the best possible. Here we improve on this guarantee and give a
mechanism whose competitiveness ratio is at most polynomial in and
, and has no dependence on . Our mechanism
is based on the projection mechanism of Nikolov, Talwar, and Zhang, but in
place of an ad-hoc noise distribution, we use a distribution which is in a
sense optimal for the projection mechanism, and analyze it using convex duality
and the restricted invertibility principle.Comment: To appear in ICALP 2015, Track
Towards More Practical Linear Programming-based Techniques for Algorithmic Mechanism Design
R. Lavy and C. Swamy (FOCS 2005, J. ACM 2011) introduced a general method for
obtaining truthful-in-expectation mechanisms from linear programming based
approximation algorithms. Due to the use of the Ellipsoid method, a direct
implementation of the method is unlikely to be efficient in practice. We
propose to use the much simpler and usually faster multiplicative weights
update method instead. The simplification comes at the cost of slightly weaker
approximation and truthfulness guarantees
Metro-Line Crossing Minimization: Hardness, Approximations, and Tractable Cases
Crossing minimization is one of the central problems in graph drawing.
Recently, there has been an increased interest in the problem of minimizing
crossings between paths in drawings of graphs. This is the metro-line crossing
minimization problem (MLCM): Given an embedded graph and a set L of simple
paths, called lines, order the lines on each edge so that the total number of
crossings is minimized. So far, the complexity of MLCM has been an open
problem. In contrast, the problem variant in which line ends must be placed in
outermost position on their edges (MLCM-P) is known to be NP-hard. Our main
results answer two open questions: (i) We show that MLCM is NP-hard. (ii) We
give an -approximation algorithm for MLCM-P
Quantum Separability and Entanglement Detection via Entanglement-Witness Search and Global Optimization
We focus on determining the separability of an unknown bipartite quantum
state by invoking a sufficiently large subset of all possible
entanglement witnesses given the expected value of each element of a set of
mutually orthogonal observables. We review the concept of an entanglement
witness from the geometrical point of view and use this geometry to show that
the set of separable states is not a polytope and to characterize the class of
entanglement witnesses (observables) that detect entangled states on opposite
sides of the set of separable states. All this serves to motivate a classical
algorithm which, given the expected values of a subset of an orthogonal basis
of observables of an otherwise unknown quantum state, searches for an
entanglement witness in the span of the subset of observables. The idea of such
an algorithm, which is an efficient reduction of the quantum separability
problem to a global optimization problem, was introduced in PRA 70 060303(R),
where it was shown to be an improvement on the naive approach for the quantum
separability problem (exhaustive search for a decomposition of the given state
into a convex combination of separable states). The last section of the paper
discusses in more generality such algorithms, which, in our case, assume a
subroutine that computes the global maximum of a real function of several
variables. Despite this, we anticipate that such algorithms will perform
sufficiently well on small instances that they will render a feasible test for
separability in some cases of interest (e.g. in 3-by-3 dimensional systems)
Relaxations of vertex packing
AbstractA polynomially computable upper bound for the weighted independence number of a graph is studied. This gives rise to a convex body containing the vertex packing polytope of the graph. This body is a polytope if and only if the graph is perfect. As an application of these notions, we show that the maximum weight independent set of an h-perfect graph can be found in polynomial time
Disorder induced rounding of the phase transition in the large q-state Potts model
The phase transition in the q-state Potts model with homogeneous
ferromagnetic couplings is strongly first order for large q, while is rounded
in the presence of quenched disorder. Here we study this phenomenon on
different two-dimensional lattices by using the fact that the partition
function of the model is dominated by a single diagram of the high-temperature
expansion, which is calculated by an efficient combinatorial optimization
algorithm. For a given finite sample with discrete randomness the free energy
is a pice-wise linear function of the temperature, which is rounded after
averaging, however the discontinuity of the internal energy at the transition
point (i.e. the latent heat) stays finite even in the thermodynamic limit. For
a continuous disorder, instead, the latent heat vanishes. At the phase
transition point the dominant diagram percolates and the total magnetic moment
is related to the size of the percolating cluster. Its fractal dimension is
found d_f=(5+\sqrt{5})/4 and it is independent of the type of the lattice and
the form of disorder. We argue that the critical behavior is exclusively
determined by disorder and the corresponding fixed point is the isotropic
version of the so called infinite randomness fixed point, which is realized in
random quantum spin chains. From this mapping we conjecture the values of the
critical exponents as \beta=2-d_f, \beta_s=1/2 and \nu=1.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, version as publishe
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