Improved Approximation Algorithms for Projection Games

The projection games (aka Label Cover) problem is of great importance to the field of approximation algorithms, since most of the NP-hardness of approximation results we know today are reductions from Label Cover. In this paper we design several approximation algorithms for projection games: (1) A p...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Manurangsi, Pasin, Moshkovitz Aaronson, Dana Hadar
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Springer US 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/106639
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5157-8086
Description
Summary:The projection games (aka Label Cover) problem is of great importance to the field of approximation algorithms, since most of the NP-hardness of approximation results we know today are reductions from Label Cover. In this paper we design several approximation algorithms for projection games: (1) A polynomial-time approximation algorithm that improves on the previous best approximation by Charikar et al. (Algorithmica 61(1):190–206, 2011). (2) A sub-exponential time algorithm with much tighter approximation for the case of smooth projection games. (3) A polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for projection games on planar graphs and a tight running time lower bound for such approximation schemes. The conference version of this paper had only the PTAS but not the running time lower bound.