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Combinatorial n-fold integer programming and applications

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Abstract

Many fundamental \(\mathsf {NP}\)-hard problems can be formulated as integer linear programs (ILPs). A famous algorithm by Lenstra solves ILPs in time that is exponential only in the dimension of the program, and polynomial in the size of the ILP. That algorithm became a ubiquitous tool in the design of fixed-parameter algorithms for \(\mathsf {NP}\)-hard problems, where one wishes to isolate the hardness of a problem by some parameter. However, in many cases using Lenstra’s algorithm has two drawbacks: First, the run time of the resulting algorithms is often double-exponential in the parameter, and second, an ILP formulation in small dimension cannot easily express problems involving many different costs. Inspired by the work of Hemmecke et al. (Math Program 137(1–2, Ser. A):325–341, 2013), we develop a single-exponential algorithm for so-called combinatorial n-fold integer programs, which are remarkably similar to prior ILP formulations for various problems, but unlike them, also allow variable dimension. We then apply our algorithm to many relevant problems problems like Closest String, Swap Bribery, Weighted Set Multicover, and several others, and obtain exponential speedups in the dependence on the respective parameters, the input size, or both. Unlike Lenstra’s algorithm, which is essentially a bounded search tree algorithm, our result uses the technique of augmenting steps. At its heart is a deep result stating that in combinatorial n-fold IPs, existence of an augmenting step implies existence of a “local” augmenting step, which can be found using dynamic programming. Our results provide an important insight into many problems by showing that they exhibit this phenomenon, and highlights the importance of augmentation techniques.

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Notes

  1. Given an IP, we say that to solve it is to either (i) declare it infeasible or unbounded or (ii) find a minimizer of it.

  2. The continuous relaxation of (IP) is the problem \(\min \{f({\mathbf{x }}) \mid A{\mathbf{x }}= {\mathbf{b }}, \, {\mathbf{l }}\le {\mathbf{x }}\le {\mathbf{u }}, {\mathbf{x }}\in \mathbb {R}^n\}\).

  3. An instance \(I'\) is equivalent to I if there is an linear mapping \(\varphi \) from the feasible solutions of \(I'\) to the feasible solutions of I preserving objective values, such that \(\varphi \) is an injection. Specifically here \(I'\) uses auxiliary variables and \(\varphi \) is a mapping dropping these variables.

  4. In fact, our result holds even in the case when f is an arbitrary (i.e. non-convex) function, but this does not imply any more power because of bounded domains.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theoretical Computer Science, Faculty of Information Technology, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Dušan Knop

  2. Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel

    Martin Koutecký

  3. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Martin Koutecký

  4. TU Hamburg, Institute for Algorithms and Complexity, Hamburg, Germany

    Matthias Mnich

  5. Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

    Matthias Mnich

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  1. Dušan Knop
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  2. Martin Koutecký
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Correspondence to Matthias Mnich.

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Research supported by CE-ITI Grant Project P202/12/G061 of GA ČR, GA UK Grant Project 1784214, ERC Starting Grant 306465 (BeyondWorstCase), DFG Grant MN 59/4-1, Israel Science Foundation Grant 308/18, and Charles University project UNCE/SCI/004. An extended abstract of these results appeared in the Proceedings of the 25th European Symposium on Algorithms [45].

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Knop, D., Koutecký, M. & Mnich, M. Combinatorial n-fold integer programming and applications. Math. Program. 184, 1–34 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-019-01402-2

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