The Power of Local Search: Maximum Coverage over a Matroid
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present an optimal, combinatorial 1-1/e approximation algorithm for Maximum Coverage over a matroid constraint, using non-oblivious local search. Calinescu, Chekuri, Pál and Vondrák have given an optimal 1-1/e approximation algorithm for the more general problem of monotone submodular maximization over a matroid constraint. The advantage of our algorithm is that it is entirely combinatorial, and in many circumstances also faster, as well as conceptually simpler. Following previous work on satisfiability problems by Alimonti, as well as by Khanna, Motwani, Sudan and Vazirani, our local search algorithm is *non-oblivious*. That is, our algorithm uses an auxiliary linear objective function to evaluate solutions. This function gives more weight to elements covered multiple times. We show that the locality ratio of the resulting local search procedure is at least 1-1/e. Our local search procedure only considers improvements of size 1. In contrast, we show that oblivious local search, guided only by the problem's objective function, achieves an approximation ratio of only (n-1)/(2n-1-k) when improvements of size k are considered. In general, our local search algorithm could take an exponential amount of time to converge to an *exact* local optimum. We address this situation by using a combination of *approximate* local search and the same partial enumeration techniques as Calinescu et al., resulting in a clean 1 - 1/e-approximation algorithm running in polynomial time.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it