,
Zihan Tan
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In the 0-Extension problem, we are given an edge-weighted graph G = (V,E,c), a set T ⊆ V of its vertices called terminals, and a semi-metric D over T, and the goal is to find an assignment f of each non-terminal vertex to a terminal, minimizing the sum, over all edges (u,v) ∈ E, the product of the edge weight c(u,v) and the distance D(f(u),f(v)) between the terminals that u,v are mapped to. Current best approximation algorithms on 0-Extension are based on rounding a linear programming relaxation called the semi-metric LP relaxation. The integrality gap of this LP, is upper bounded by O(log|T|/log log|T|) and lower bounded by Ω((log|T|)^{2/3}), has been shown to be closely related to the quality of cut and flow vertex sparsifiers.
We study a variant of the 0-Extension problem where Steiner vertices are allowed. Specifically, we focus on the integrality gap of the same semi-metric LP relaxation to this new problem. Following from previous work, this new integrality gap turns out to be closely related to the quality achievable by cut/flow vertex sparsifiers with Steiner nodes, a major open problem in graph compression. We show that the new integrality gap stays superconstant Ω(log log |T|) even if we allow a super-linear O(|T|log^{1-ε}|T|) number of Steiner nodes.
@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.47,
author = {Chen, Yu and Tan, Zihan},
title = {{Lower Bounds on 0-Extension with Steiner Nodes}},
booktitle = {51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024)},
pages = {47:1--47:18},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-322-5},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {297},
editor = {Bringmann, Karl and Grohe, Martin and Puppis, Gabriele and Svensson, Ola},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.47},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-201905},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.47},
annote = {Keywords: Graph Algorithms, Zero Extension, Integrality Gap}
}