We show that under mild assumptions for a problem whose solutions admit a dynamic programming-like recurrence relation, we can still find a solution under additional packing constraints, which need to be satisfied approximately. The number of additional constraints can be very large, for example, polynomial in the problem size. Technically, we reinterpret the dynamic programming subproblems and their solutions as a network design problem. Inspired by techniques from, for example, the Directed Steiner Tree problem, we construct a strong LP relaxation, on which we then apply randomized rounding. Our approximation guarantees on the packing constraints have roughly the form of a $(n^ε \mathrm{polylog}\ n)$-approximation in time $n^{O(1/ε)}$, for any $ε> 0$. By setting $ε=\log \log n/\log n$, we obtain a polylogarithmic approximation in quasi-polynomial time, or by setting $ε$ as a constant, an $n^ε$-approximation in polynomial time.
While there are necessary assumptions on the form of the DP, it is general enough to capture many textbook dynamic programs from Shortest Path to Longest Common Subsequence. Our algorithm then implies that we can impose additional constraints on the solutions to these problems. This allows us to model various problems from the literature in approximation algorithms, many of which were not thought to be connected to dynamic programming. In fact, our result can even be applied indirectly to some problems that involve covering instead of packing constraints, for example, the Directed Steiner Tree problem, or those that do not directly follow a recurrence relation, for example, variants of the Matching problem.
We present an algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem on instances which satisfy the triangle inequality. Like several existing algorithms, it achieves approximation ratio O(log n). Unlike previous algorithms, it uses randomized rounding.
Following previous theoretical work by Srinivasan (FOCS 2001) and the first author (STACS 2006) and a first experimental evaluation on random instances (ALENEX 2009), we investigate how the recently developed different approaches to generate randomized roundings satisfying disjoint cardinality constraints behave when used in two classical algorithmic problems, namely low-congestion routing in networks and max-coverage problems in hypergraphs. We generally find that all randomized rounding algorithms work well, much better than what is guaranteed by existing theoretical work. The derandomized v…
We describe a novel algorithm for rounding packing integer programs based on multidimensional Brownian motion in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Starting from an optimal fractional feasible solution $\bar{x}$, the procedure converges in polynomial time to a distribution over (possibly infeasible) point set $P \subset {\{0,1 \}}^n$ such that the expected value of any linear objective function over $P$ equals the value at $\bar{x}$. This is an alternate approach to the classical randomized rounding method of Raghavan and Thompson \cite{RT:87}. Our procedure is very general and in conjunction with discrepancy ba…
We give a general method for rounding linear programs that combines the commonly used iterated rounding and randomized rounding techniques. In particular, we show that whenever iterated rounding can be applied to a problem with some slack, there is a randomized procedure that returns an integral solution that satisfies the guarantees of iterated rounding and also has concentration properties. We use this to give new results for several classic problems where iterated rounding has been useful.
Randomized rounding is a standard method, based on the probabilistic method, for designing combinatorial approximation algorithms. In Raghavan's seminal paper introducing the method (1988), he writes: "The time taken to solve the linear program relaxations of the integer programs dominates the net running time theoretically (and, most likely, in practice as well)." This paper explores how this bottleneck can be avoided for randomized rounding algorithms for packing and covering problems (linear programs, or mixed integer linear programs, having no negative coefficients). The resulting algorith…
Rounding linear programs using techniques from discrepancy is a recent approach that has been very successful in certain settings. However this method also has some limitations when compared to approaches such as randomized and iterative rounding. We provide an extension of the discrepancy-based rounding algorithm due to Lovett-Meka that (i) combines the advantages of both randomized and iterated rounding, (ii) makes it applicable to settings with more general combinatorial structure such as matroids. As applications of this approach, we obtain new results for various classical problems such a…
We give a new randomized LP-rounding 1.725-approximation algorithm for the metric Fault-Tolerant Uncapacitated Facility Location problem. This improves on the previously best known 2.076-approximation algorithm of Swamy & Shmoys. To the best of our knowledge, our work provides the first application of a dependent-rounding technique in the domain of facility location. The analysis of our algorithm benefits from, and extends, methods developed for Uncapacitated Facility Location; it also helps uncover new properties of the dependent-rounding approach. An important concept that we develop is a no…
Many network design problems deal with the design of low-cost networks that are resilient to the failure of their elements, such as nodes or links. One such problem is Connectivity Augmentation, where the goal is to cheaply increase the connectivity of a network from a value k to k+1. The most studied setting focuses on edge-connectivity, which reduces to k=2, called Cactus Augmentation. From an approximation perspective, Byrka, Grandoni, and Jabal Ameli (2020) were the first to break the 2-approximation barrier for this problem, by exploiting a connection to the Steiner Tree problem, and by t…
We propose a unifying framework based on configuration linear programs and randomized rounding, for different energy optimization problems in the dynamic speed-scaling setting. We apply our framework to various scheduling and routing problems in heterogeneous computing and networking environments. We first consider the energy minimization problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a set of parallel speed scalable processors in a fully heterogeneous setting. For both the preemptive-non-migratory and the preemptive-migratory variants, our approach allows us to obtain solutions of almost the same qua…
We present a new dynamic matching sparsification scheme. From this scheme we derive a framework for dynamically rounding fractional matchings against \emph{adaptive adversaries}. Plugging in known dynamic fractional matching algorithms into our framework, we obtain numerous randomized dynamic matching algorithms which work against adaptive adversaries (the first such algorithms, as all previous randomized algorithms for this problem assumed an \emph{oblivious} adversary). In particular, for any constant $ε>0$, our framework yields $(2+ε)$-approximate algorithms with constant update time or pol…
International Computer Science Institute（国际计算机科学研究所）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Xerox Research Centre India（施乐印度研究中心）；Purdue University（普渡大学）
We present and analyze a simple, two-step algorithm to approximate the optimal solution of the sparse PCA problem. Our approach first solves a L1 penalized version of the NP-hard sparse PCA optimization problem and then uses a randomized rounding strategy to sparsify the resulting dense solution. Our main theoretical result guarantees an additive error approximation and provides a tradeoff between sparsity and accuracy. Our experimental evaluation indicates that our approach is competitive in practice, even compared to state-of-the-art toolboxes such as Spasm.
Motivated by several applications, we consider the problem of randomly rounding a fractional solution in a matroid (base) polytope to an integral one. We consider the pipage rounding technique and also present a new technique, randomized swap rounding. Our main technical results are concentration bounds for functions of random variables arising from these rounding techniques. We prove Chernoff-type concentration bounds for linear functions of random variables arising from both techniques, and also a lower-tail exponential bound for monotone submodular functions of variables arising from random…
The Virtual Network Embedding Problem (VNEP) captures the essence of many resource allocation problems of today's infrastructure providers, which offer their physical computation and networking resources to customers. Customers request resources in the form of Virtual Networks, i.e. as a directed graph which specifies computational requirements at the nodes and communication requirements on the edges. An embedding of a Virtual Network on the shared physical infrastructure is the joint mapping of (virtual) nodes to physical servers together with the mapping of (virtual) edges onto paths in the …
Unsplittable flow problems cover a wide range of telecommunication and transportation problems and their efficient resolution is key to a number of applications. In this work, we study algorithms that can scale up to large graphs and important numbers of commodities. We present and analyze in detail a heuristic based on the linear relaxation of the problem and randomized rounding. We provide empirical evidence that this approach is competitive with state-of-the-art resolution methods either by its scaling performance or by the quality of its solutions. We provide a variation of the heuristic w…
We present a new simple method for rounding a semidefinite programming relaxation of a constraint satisfaction problem. We apply it to the problem of approximate angular synchronization. Specifically, we are given directed distances on a circle (i.e., directed angles) between pairs of elements and our goal is to assign the elements to positions on a circle so as to preserve these distances as much as possible. The feasibility of our rounding scheme is based on properties of the well-known stochastic process called Brownian motion. Based on computational and other evidence, we conjecture that t…
The maximum volume $j$-simplex problem asks to compute the $j$-dimensional simplex of maximum volume inside the convex hull of a given set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{Q}^d$. We give a deterministic approximation algorithm for this problem which achieves an approximation ratio of $e^{j/2 + o(j)}$. The problem is known to be $\mathrm{NP}$-hard to approximate within a factor of $c^{j}$ for some constant $c > 1$. Our algorithm also gives a factor $e^{j + o(j)}$ approximation for the problem of finding the principal $j\times j$ submatrix of a rank $d$ positive semidefinite matrix with the largest det…
We develop new techniques for rounding packing integer programs using iterative randomized rounding. It is based on a novel application of multidimensional Brownian motion in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Let $\overset{\sim}{x} \in {[0,1]}^n$ be a fractional feasible solution of a packing constraint $A x \leq 1,\ \ $ $A \in {\{0,1 \}}^{m\times n}$ that maximizes a linear objective function. The independent randomized rounding method of Raghavan-Thompson rounds each variable $x_i$ to 1 with probability $\overset{\sim}{x_i}$ and 0 otherwise. The expected value of the rounded objective function matches the fra…
The multiway-cut problem is, given a weighted graph and k >= 2 terminal nodes, to find a minimum-weight set of edges whose removal separates all the terminals. The problem is NP-hard, and even NP-hard to approximate within 1+delta for some small delta > 0. Calinescu, Karloff, and Rabani (1998) gave an algorithm with performance guarantee 3/2-1/k, based on a geometric relaxation of the problem. In this paper, we give improved randomized rounding schemes for their relaxation, yielding a 12/11-approximation algorithm for k=3 and a 1.3438-approximation algorithm in general. Our approach hinges on …
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 wh…
We design an expected polynomial-time, truthful-in-expectation, (1-1/e)-approximation mechanism for welfare maximization in a fundamental class of combinatorial auctions. Our results apply to bidders with valuations that are m matroid rank sums (MRS), which encompass most concrete examples of submodular functions studied in this context, including coverage functions, matroid weighted-rank functions, and convex combinations thereof. Our approximation factor is the best possible, even for known and explicitly given coverage valuations, assuming P != NP. Ours is the first truthful-in-expectation …
We consider the classic problem of scheduling jobs on unrelated machines so as to minimize the weighted sum of completion times. Recently, for a small constant $\varepsilon >0 $, Bansal et al. gave a $(3/2-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm improving upon the natural barrier of $3/2$ which follows from independent randomized rounding. In simplified terms, their result is obtained by an enhancement of independent randomized rounding via strong negative correlation properties. In this work, we take a different approach and propose to use the same elegant rounding scheme for the weighted compl…
The request-trip-vehicle assignment problem is at the heart of a popular decomposition strategy for online vehicle routing. In this framework, assignments are done in batches in order to exploit any shareability among vehicles and incoming travel requests. We study a natural ILP formulation and its LP relaxation. Our main result is an LP-based randomized rounding algorithm that, whenever the instance is feasible, leverages mild assumptions to return an assignment whose: i) expected cost is at most that of an optimal solution, and ii) expected fraction of unassigned requests is at most $1/e$. I…
We present a spectral approach to design approximation algorithms for network design problems. We observe that the underlying mathematical questions are the spectral rounding problems, which were studied in spectral sparsification and in discrepancy theory. We extend these results to incorporate additional non-negative linear constraints, and show that they can be used to significantly extend the scope of network design problems that can be solved. Our algorithm for spectral rounding is an iterative randomized rounding algorithm based on the regret minimization framework. In some settings, thi…
Semidefinite programming is a powerful tool in the design and analysis of approximation algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. In particular, the random hyperplane rounding method of Goemans and Williamson has been extensively studied for more than two decades, resulting in various extensions to the original technique and beautiful algorithms for a wide range of applications. Despite the fact that this approach yields tight approximation guarantees for some problems, e.g., Max-Cut, for many others, e.g., Max-SAT and Max-DiCut, the tight approximation ratio is still unknown. One of…
We present a framework for deterministically rounding a dynamic fractional matching. Applying our framework in a black-box manner on top of existing fractional matching algorithms, we derive the following new results: (1) The first deterministic algorithm for maintaining a $(2-δ)$-approximate maximum matching in a fully dynamic bipartite graph, in arbitrarily small polynomial update time. (2) The first deterministic algorithm for maintaining a $(1+δ)$-approximate maximum matching in a decremental bipartite graph, in polylogarithmic update time. (3) The first deterministic algorithm for maintai…
We present a 1.91457-approximation algorithm for the prize-collecting travelling salesman problem. This is obtained by combining a randomized variant of a rounding algorithm of Bienstock et al. and a primal-dual algorithm of Goemans and Williamson.
In a second seminal paper on the application of semidefinite programming to graph partitioning problems, Goemans and Williamson showed how to formulate and round a complex semidefinite program to give what is to date still the best-known approximation guarantee of .836008 for Max-$3$-Cut. (This approximation ratio was also achieved independently by De Klerk et al.) Goemans and Williamson left open the problem of how to apply their techniques to Max-$k$-Cut for general $k$. They point out that it does not seem straightforward or even possible to formulate a good quality complex semidefinite pro…
Convex relaxations based on different hierarchies of linear/semi-definite programs have been used recently to devise approximation algorithms for various optimization problems. The approximation guarantee of these algorithms improves with the number of {\em rounds} $r$ in the hierarchy, though the complexity of solving (or even writing down the solution for) the $r$'th level program grows as $n^{Ω(r)}$ where $n$ is the input size. In this work, we observe that many of these algorithms are based on {\em local} rounding procedures that only use a small part of the SDP solution (of size $n^{O(1)}…
The Lovasz Local Lemma due to Erdos and Lovasz is a powerful tool in proving the existence of rare events. We present an extension of this lemma, which works well when the event to be shown to exist is a conjunction of individual events, each of which asserts that a random variable does not deviate much from its mean. As applications, we consider two classes of NP-hard integer programs: minimax and covering integer programs. A key technique, randomized rounding of linear relaxations, was developed by Raghavan and Thompson to derive good approximation algorithms for such problems. We use our ex…
We present an optimal, combinatorial 1-1/e approximation algorithm for monotone submodular optimization over a matroid constraint. Compared to the continuous greedy algorithm (Calinescu, Chekuri, Pal and Vondrak, 2008), our algorithm is extremely simple and requires no rounding. It consists of the greedy algorithm followed by local search. Both phases are run not on the actual objective function, but on a related non-oblivious potential function, which is also monotone submodular. Our algorithm runs in randomized time O(n^8u), where n is the rank of the given matroid and u is the size of its g…
Guruswami and Sinop give a $O(1/δ)$ approximation guarantee for the non-uniform Sparsest Cut problem by solving $O(r)$-level Lasserre semidefinite constraints, provided that the generalized eigenvalues of the Laplacians of the cost and demand graphs satisfy a certain spectral condition, namely, $λ_{r+1} \geq Φ^{*}/(1-δ)$. Their key idea is a rounding technique that first maps a vector-valued solution to $[0, 1]$ using appropriately scaled projections onto Lasserre vectors. In this paper, we show that similar projections and analysis can be obtained using only $\ell_{2}^{2}$ triangle inequality…
We study the problem of allocating $m$ items to $n$ agents subject to maximizing the Nash social welfare (NSW) objective. We write a novel convex programming relaxation for this problem, and we show that a simple randomized rounding algorithm gives a $1/e$ approximation factor of the objective. Our main technical contribution is an extension of Gurvits's lower bound on the coefficient of the square-free monomial of a degree $m$-homogeneous stable polynomial on $m$ variables to all homogeneous polynomials. We use this extension to analyze the expected welfare of the allocation returned by our r…
Several algorithms with an approximation guarantee of $O(\log n)$ are known for the Set Cover problem, where $n$ is the number of elements. We study a generalization of the Set Cover problem, called the Partition Set Cover problem. Here, the elements are partitioned into $r$ \emph{color classes}, and we are required to cover at least $k_t$ elements from each color class $\mathcal{C}_t$, using the minimum number of sets. We give a randomized LP-rounding algorithm that is an $O(β+ \log r)$ approximation for the Partition Set Cover problem. Here $β$ denotes the approximation guarantee for a relat…
We give new rounding schemes for the standard linear programming relaxation of the correlation clustering problem, achieving approximation factors almost matching the integrality gaps: - For complete graphs our appoximation is $2.06 - \varepsilon$ for a fixed constant $\varepsilon$, which almost matches the previously known integrality gap of $2$. - For complete $k$-partite graphs our approximation is $3$. We also show a matching integrality gap. - For complete graphs with edge weights satisfying triangle inequalities and probability constraints, our approximation is $1.5$, and we show an inte…
The current best approximation algorithms for $k$-median rely on first obtaining a structured fractional solution known as a bi-point solution, and then rounding it to an integer solution. We improve this second step by unifying and refining previous approaches. We describe a hierarchy of increasingly-complex partitioning schemes for the facilities, along with corresponding sets of algorithms and factor-revealing non-linear programs. We prove that the third layer of this hierarchy is a $2.613$-approximation, improving upon the current best ratio of $2.675$, while no layer can be proved better …
Let A be a matrix, c be any linear objective function and x be a fractional vector, say an LP solution to some discrete optimization problem. Then a recurring task in theoretical computer science (and in approximation algorithms in particular) is to obtain an integral vector y such that Ax is roughly Ay and c*y exceeds c*x by only a moderate factor. We give a new randomized rounding procedure for this task, provided that A has bounded Delta-approximate entropy. This property means that for uniformly chosen random signs chi(j) in {-1,+1} on any subset of the columns, the outcome A*chi can be ap…
We show a new way to round vector solutions of semidefinite programming (SDP) hierarchies into integral solutions, based on a connection between these hierarchies and the spectrum of the input graph. We demonstrate the utility of our method by providing a new SDP-hierarchy based algorithm for constraint satisfaction problems with 2-variable constraints (2-CSP's). More concretely, we show for every 2-CSP instance I a rounding algorithm for r rounds of the Lasserre SDP hierarchy for I that obtains an integral solution that is at most \eps worse than the relaxation's value (normalized to lie in […
We introduce a novel method for clustering using a semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxation of the Max k-Cut problem. The approach is based on a new methodology for rounding the solution of an SDP relaxation using iterated linear optimization. We show the vertices of the Max k-Cut relaxation correspond to partitions of the data into at most k sets. We also show the vertices are attractive fixed points of iterated linear optimization. Each step of this iterative process solves a relaxation of the closest vertex problem and leads to a new clustering problem where the underlying clusters are mor…
Linear programming has played a key role in the study of algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems. In the field of approximation algorithms, this is well illustrated by the uncapacitated facility location problem. A variety of algorithmic methodologies, such as LP-rounding and primal-dual method, have been applied to and evolved from algorithms for this problem. Unfortunately, this collection of powerful algorithmic techniques had not yet been applicable to the more general capacitated facility location problem. In fact, all of the known algorithms with good performance guarantees we…
We study LP-rounding approximation algorithms for metric uncapacitated facility-location problems. We first give a new analysis for the algorithm of Chudak and Shmoys, which differs from the analysis of Byrka and Aardal in that now we do not need any bound based on the solution to the dual LP program. Besides obtaining the optimal bifactor approximation as do Byrka and Aardal, we can now also show that the algorithm with scaling parameter equaling 1.58 is, in fact, an 1.58-approximation algorithm. More importantly, we suggest an approach based on additional randomization and analyses such as o…
