A Randomized Rounding Approach for DAG Edge Deletion
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the DAG Edge Deletion problem, we are given an edge-weighted directed acyclic graph and a parameter k, and the goal is to delete the minimum weight set of edges so that the resulting graph has no paths of length k. This problem, which has applications to scheduling, was introduced in 2015 by Kenkre, Pandit, Purohit, and Saket. They gave a k-approximation and showed that it is UGC-Hard to approximate better than ⌊0.5k⌋ for any constant k ≥ 4 using a work of Svensson from 2012. The approximation ratio was improved to 2/3(k+1) by Klein and Wexler in 2016. In this work, we introduce a randomized rounding framework based on distributions over vertex labels in [0,1]. The most natural distribution is to sample labels independently from the uniform distribution over [0,1]. We show this leads to a (2-√2)(k+1) ≈ 0.585(k+1)-approximation. By using a modified (but still independent) label distribution, we obtain a 0.549(k+1)-approximation for the problem, as well as show that no independent distribution over labels can improve our analysis to below 0.542(k+1). Finally, we show a 0.5(k+1)-approximation for bipartite graphs and for instances with structured LP solutions. Whether this ratio can be obtained in general is open.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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