Jain, Pallavi

In the MaxSAT with Cardinality Constraint problem (CC-MaxSAT), we are given a CNF-formula Φ, and a positive integer k, and the goal is to find an assignment β with at most k variables set to true (also called a weight k-assignment) such that the number of clauses satisfied by β is maximized. Maximum Coverage can be seen as a special case of CC-MaxSat, where the formula Φ is monotone, i.e., does not contain any negative literals. CC-MaxSat and Maximum Coverage are extremely well-studied problems in the approximation algorithms as well as the parameterized complexity literature. Our first conceptual contribution is that CC-MaxSat and Maximum Coverage are equivalent to each other in the context of FPT-Approximation parameterized by k (here, the approximation is in terms of the number of clauses satisfied/elements covered). In particular, we give a randomized reduction from CC-MaxSat to Maximum Coverage running in time O(1/ϵ)k · (m + n)O(1) that preserves the approximation guarantee up to a factor of (1 − ϵ). Furthermore, this reduction also works in the presence of “fairness” constraints on the satisfied clauses, as well as matroid constraints on the set of variables that are assigned true. Here, the “fairness” constraints are modeled by partitioning the clauses of the formula Φ into r different colors, and the goal is to find an assignment that satisfies at least tj clauses of each color 1 ≤ j ≤ r. Armed with this reduction, we focus on designing FPT-Approximation schemes (FPT-ASes) for Maximum Coverage and its generalizations. Our algorithms are based on a novel combination of a variety of ideas, including a carefully designed probability distribution that exploits sparse coverage functions. These algorithms substantially generalize the results in Jain et al. [SODA 2023] for CC-MaxSat and Maximum Coverage for Kd,d-free set systems (i.e., no d sets share d elements), as well as a recent FPT-AS for Matroid Constrained Maximum Coverage by Sellier [ESA 2023] for frequency-d set systems.

In liquid democracy, agents can either vote directly or delegate their vote to a different agent of their choice. This results in a power structure in which certain agents possess more voting weight than others. As a result, it opens up certain possibilities of vote manipulation, including control and bribery, that do not exist in standard voting scenarios of direct democracy. Here we formalize a certain kind of election control - in which an external agent may change certain delegation arcs - and study the computational complexity of the corresponding combinatorial problem.

Classical work on metric space based committee selection problem interprets distance as "near is better". In this work, motivated by real-life situations, we interpret distance as "far is better". Formally stated, we initiate the study of "obnoxious"committee scoring rules when the voters' preferences are expressed via a metric space. To accomplish this, we propose a model where large distances imply high satisfaction (in contrast to the classical setting where shorter distances imply high satisfaction) and study the egalitarian avatar of the well-known Chamberlin-Courant voting rule and some of its generalizations. For a given integer value ë between 1 and k, the committee size, a voter derives satisfaction from only the ëth favorite committee member; the goal is to maximize the satisfaction of the least satisfied voter. For the special case of λ = 1, this yields the egalitarian Chamberlin-Courant rule. In this paper, we consider general metric space and the special case of a d-dimensional Euclidean space. We show that when λ is 1 and k, the problem is polynomial-time solvable in ℝ2 and general metric space, respectively. However, for λ = k - 1, it is NP-hard even in ℝ2. Thus, we have "double-dichotomy"in ℝ2 with respect to the value of λ, where the extreme cases are solvable in polynomial time but an intermediate case is NP-hard. Furthermore, this phenomenon appears to be "tight"for ℝ2 because the problem is NP-hard for general metric space, even for λ = 1. Consequently, we are motivated to explore the problem in the realm of (parameterized) approximation algorithms and obtain positive results. Interestingly, we note that this generalization of Chamberlin-Courant rules encodes practical constraints that are relevant to solutions for certain facility locations.