Approximating Pareto Sum via Bounded Monotone Min-Plus Convolution

Abstract

The Pareto sum of two-dimensional point sets P and Q in ℝ² is defined as the skyline of the points in their Minkowski sum. The problem of efficiently computing the Pareto sum arises frequently in bi-criteria optimization algorithms. Prior work establishes that computing the Pareto sum of sets P and Q of size n suffers from conditional lower bounds that rule out strongly subquadratic O(n^{2-ε})-time algorithms, even when the output size is Θ(n). Naturally, we ask: How efficiently can we approximate Pareto sums, both in theory and practice? Can we beat the near-quadratic-time state of the art for exact algorithms?
On the theoretical side, we formulate a notion of additively approximate Pareto sets and show that computing an approximate Pareto set is fine-grained equivalent to Bounded Monotone Min-Plus Convolution. Leveraging a remarkable Õ(n^{1.5})-time algorithm for the latter problem (Chi, Duan, Xie, Zhang; STOC '22), we thus obtain a strongly subquadratic (and conditionally optimal) approximation algorithm for computing Pareto sums.
On the practical side, we engineer different algorithmic approaches for approximating Pareto sets on realistic instances. Our implementations enable a granular trade-off between approximation quality and running time/output size compared to the state of the art for exact algorithms established in (Funke, Hespe, Sanders, Storandt, Truschel; Algorithmica '25). Perhaps surprisingly, the (theoretical) connection to Bounded Monotone Min-Plus Convolution remains beneficial even for our implementations: in particular, we implement a simplified, yet still subquadratic version of an algorithm due to Chi, Duan, Xie and Zhang, which on some sufficiently large instances outperforms the competing quadratic-time approaches.