Problems
Everything in the archive: the problem as it was posed, what has been attempted against it, and who checked each attempt. The mark down the left of the list says who has looked — a person, a machine, or nobody yet. Human reviews and machine checks are counted separately and are never added together.
28 problems
Axiotis and Sviridenko conjectured that the linear dependence on the restricted condition number in sparse convex optimization cannot be improved by a polynomial-time algorithm. Their conjectured lower bound is established for…
Arjevani et al. asked whether almost-surely bounded oracle error permits a better rate than bounded variance for smooth nonconvex stochastic optimization. It does not: every randomized adaptive algorithm still needs Omega(dL/eps^2 + dL…
Does the Dinitz-Garg-Goemans cost-preserving unsplittable-flow rounding conjecture survive on acyclic planar instances with only four terminals? An explicit instance answers no: every cost-nonincreasing unsplittable routing has upper…
What is the best deterministic polynomial-time approximation ratio for the permanent of a Hermitian positive semidefinite matrix? Resolved up to lower-order terms in the exponent: an explicit concave maximisation widehat P(A) satisfies…
For the released four-terminal planar acyclic single-source unsplittable-flow gadget, require one unsplittable routing to be no more expensive than a prescribed fractional routing under each of m strictly positive full-demand…
After Chen-He-Ye-Yuan's counterexample to direct three-block ADMM, the subclass in which the third constraint block is the identity matrix remained unresolved: the literature contained neither a convergence proof nor a counterexample.…
For deterministically minimizing a convex 1-Lipschitz function on the d-dimensional ball using only exact function values, the query complexity sat between Ω(d) and O(d^2 log^2 d) since 1996. The paper proves a near-quadratic lower bound…
Does every instance of indivisible goods with additive valuations admit a balanced allocation (any two bundles differing in size by at most one) that is simultaneously envy-free up to one good (EF1) and fractionally Pareto optimal (fPO)?…
Anari, Charikar and Ramakrishnan asked whether every fractional perfect matching admits a perfect matching that is α-thin with respect to it, meaning it crosses every cut at most α times the fractional amount. Resolved up to…
Sampling a nearly uniform Eulerian tour of a directed Eulerian multigraph was stuck at mn-type running times coming from arborescence sampling. A randomized algorithm achieves widetildeO(m^3/2) worst case, breaking that barrier on sparse…
Carefully designed stepsize schedules alone accelerate plain gradient descent beyond its textbook O(1/T) rate, without momentum. Whether they can reach the optimal O(T^-2) was open. A lower bound of Omega(T^-1.9319) for last-iterate…
For smooth convex-concave min-max problems, can anchored gradient descent-ascent be scheduled so that its exact last-iterate squared-gradient residual is O(1/t), closing the gap left by the 2019 analysis?
Shellsort's worst-case running time is unknown for the gap sequences actually used in practice. Encoding a permutation as the polynomial σ(1)z + … + σ(n)z^n gives a framework for lower bounds, and yields Ω(N^1.26) for Tokuda's 1992…
What is the optimal competitive ratio for online vertex cover when edges arrive one at a time? The paper proves a tight factor-2 lower bound via a reduction in the blueprint framework of Assadi, Jiang and Xiang, closing the gap left by…
For a designated face of an undirected unweighted planar graph, how many distinct distance patterns can vertices have? Li and Parter (STOC 2019) proved an upper bound; Mozes, Wallheimer and Weimann conjectured the true answer matches their…
A polynomial-time algorithm for computing an optimal committee under any Thiele voting rule on the Voter Interval domain, resolving a ten-year-old open problem posed for Proportional Approval Voting by Elkind and Lackner and later extended…
Does a single ReLU neuron trained on modular addition align to one Fourier frequency? Open Problem MAIS-O60, itself posed by Claude Fable 5 under the direction of Lionel Levine, is answered negatively: an explicit construction reaches a…
Ramachandra and Natarajan conjectured a bound on the pairwise independent correlation gap in their 2025 Operations Research Letters paper. An explicit counterexample refutes it.
In the list update problem, is the simple transposition rule optimal under IID requests? The question traces to Rivest's 1976 study of self-organizing lists. The paper proves transposition is within a small constant factor of the optimal…
For single-source unsplittable flow, every fractional flow can be rounded to an unsplittable flow whose cost is no higher than the fractional cost, while each arc's load is exceeded by at most the maximum demand. (The cost version of…