Satisfiability to Coverage in Presence of Fairness, Matroid, and Global Constraints

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 K_d,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.