If $G$ is a group, we say a subset $S$ of $G$ is product-free if the equation $xy=z$ has no solutions with $x,y,z \in S$. For $D \in \mathbb{N}$, a group $G$ is said to be $D$-quasirandom if the minimal dimension of a nontrivial complex irreducible representation of $G$ is at least $D$. Gowers showed that in a $D$-quasirandom finite group $G$, the maximal size of a product-free set is at most $|G|/D^{1/3}$. This disproved a longstanding conjecture of Babai and S\'os from 1985. For the special unitary group, $G=SU(n)$, Gowers observed that his argument yields an upper bound of $n^{-1/3}$ on the measure of a measurable product-free subset. In this paper, we improve Gowers' upper bound to $\exp(-cn^{1/3})$, where $c>0$ is an absolute constant. In fact, we establish something stronger, namely, product-mixing for measurable subsets of $SU(n)$ with measure at least $\exp(-cn^{1/3})$; for this product-mixing result, the $n^{1/3}$ in the exponent is sharp. Our approach involves introducing novel hypercontractive inequalities, which imply that the non-Abelian Fourier spectrum of the indicator function of a small set concentrates on high-dimensional irreducible representations. Our hypercontractive inequalities are obtained via methods from representation theory, harmonic analysis, random matrix theory and differential geometry. We generalize our hypercontractive inequalities from $SU(n)$ to an arbitrary $D$-quasirandom compact connected Lie group for $D$ at least an absolute constant, thereby extending our results on product-free sets to such groups. We also demonstrate various other applications of our inequalities to geometry (viz., non-Abelian Brunn-Minkowski type inequalities), mixing times, and the theory of growth in compact Lie groups.
Let $S$ be a set of $n$ sites in the plane, so that every site $s \in S$ has an associated radius $r_s > 0$. Let $\mathcal{D}(S)$ be the disk intersection graph defined by $S$, i.e., the graph with vertex set $S$ and an edge between two distinct sites $s, t \in S$ if and only if the disks with centers $s$, $t$ and radii $r_s$, $r_t$ intersect.Our goal is to design data structures that maintain the connectivity structure of $\mathcal{D}(S)$ as sites are inserted and/or deleted in $S$.
Let $G$ be an intersection graph of $n$ geometric objects in the plane. We show that a maximum matching in $G$ can be found in $O(\rho^{3\omega/2}n^{\omega/2})$ time with high probability, where $\rho$ is the density of the geometric objects and $\omega>2$ is a constant such that $n \times n$ matrices can be multiplied in $O(n^\omega)$ time. The same result holds for any subgraph of $G$, as long as a geometric representation is at hand. For this, we combine algebraic methods, namely computing the rank of a matrix via Gaussian elimination, with the fact that geometric intersection graphs have small separators. We also show that in many interesting cases, the maximum matching problem in a general geometric intersection graph can be reduced to the case of bounded density. In particular, a maximum matching in the intersection graph of any family of translates of a convex object in the plane can be found in $O(n^{\omega/2})$ time with high probability, and a maximum matching in the intersection graph of a family of planar disks with radii in $[1, \Psi]$ can be found in $O(\Psi^6\log^{11} n + \Psi^{12 \omega} n^{\omega/2})$ time with high probability.
In this paper, the key objects of interest are the sequential covariance matrices $\mathbf{S}_{n,t}$ and their largest eigenvalues. Here, the matrix $\mathbf{S}_{n,t}$ is computed as the empirical covariance associated with observations $\{\mathbf{x}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{x}_{ \lfloor nt \rfloor } \}$, for $t\in [0,1]$. The observations $\mathbf{x}_1,\ldots,\mathbf{x}_n$ are assumed to be i.i.d. $p$-dimensional vectors with zero mean, and a covariance matrix that is a fixed-rank perturbation of the identity matrix. Treating $\{ \mathbf{S}_{n,t}\}_{t \in [0,1]}$ as a matrix-valued stochastic process indexed by $t$, we study the behavior of the largest eigenvalues of $\mathbf{S}_{n,t}$, as $t$ varies, with $n$ and $p$ increasing simultaneously, so that $p/n \to y \in (0,1)$. As a key contribution of this work, we establish the weak convergence of the stochastic process corresponding to the sample spiked eigenvalues, if their population counterparts exceed the critical phase-transition threshold. Our analysis of the limiting process is fully comprehensive revealing, in general, non-Gaussian limiting processes. As an application, we consider a class of change-point problems, where the interest is in detecting structural breaks in the covariance caused by a change in magnitude of the spiked eigenvalues. For this purpose, we propose two different maximal statistics corresponding to centered spiked eigenvalues of the sequential covariances. We show the existence of limiting null distributions for these statistics, and prove consistency of the test under fixed alternatives. Moreover, we compare the behavior of the proposed tests through a simulation study.
We give a new algorithm for learning mixtures of $k$ Gaussians (with identity covariance in $\mathbb{R}^n$) to TV error $\varepsilon$, with quasi-polynomial ($O(n^{\text{poly log}\left(\frac{n+k}{\varepsilon}\right)})$) time and sample complexity, under a minimum weight assumption. Unlike previous approaches, most of which are algebraic in nature, our approach is analytic and relies on the framework of diffusion models. Diffusion models are a modern paradigm for generative modeling, which typically rely on learning the score function (gradient log-pdf) along a process transforming a pure noise distribution, in our case a Gaussian, to the data distribution. Despite their dazzling performance in tasks such as image generation, there are few end-to-end theoretical guarantees that they can efficiently learn nontrivial families of distributions; we give some of the first such guarantees. We proceed by deriving higher-order Gaussian noise sensitivity bounds for the score functions for a Gaussian mixture to show that that they can be inductively learned using piecewise polynomial regression (up to poly-logarithmic degree), and combine this with known convergence results for diffusion models. Our results extend to continuous mixtures of Gaussians where the mixing distribution is supported on a union of $k$ balls of constant radius. In particular, this applies to the case of Gaussian convolutions of distributions on low-dimensional manifolds, or more generally sets with small covering number.
A string $w$ is said to be a minimal absent word (MAW) for a string $S$ if $w$ does not occur in $S$ and any proper substring of $w$ occurs in $S$. We focus on non-trivial MAWs which are of length at least 2. Finding such non-trivial MAWs for a given string is motivated for applications in bioinformatics and data compression. Fujishige et al. [TCS 2023] proposed a data structure of size $\Theta(n)$ that can output the set $\mathsf{MAW}(S)$ of all MAWs for a given string $S$ of length $n$ in $O(n + |\mathsf{MAW}(S)|)$ time, based on the directed acyclic word graph (DAWG). In this paper, we present a more space efficient data structure based on the compact DAWG (CDAWG), which can output $\mathsf{MAW}(S)$ in $O(|\mathsf{MAW}(S)|)$ time with $O(\mathsf{e}_\min)$ space, where $\mathsf{e}_\min$ denotes the minimum of the sizes of the CDAWGs for $S$ and for its reversal $S^R$. For any strings of length $n$, it holds that $\mathsf{e}_\min < 2n$, and for highly repetitive strings $\mathsf{e}_\min$ can be sublinear (up to logarithmic) in $n$. We also show that MAWs and their generalization minimal rare words have close relationships with extended bispecial factors, via the CDAWG.
We construct $n$-node graphs on which any $O(n)$-size spanner has additive error at least $+\Omega(n^{3/17})$, improving on the previous best lower bound of $\Omega(n^{1/7})$ [Bodwin-Hoppenworth FOCS '22]. Our construction completes the first two steps of a particular three-step research program, introduced in prior work and overviewed here, aimed at producing tight bounds for the problem by aligning aspects of the upper and lower bound constructions. More specifically, we develop techniques that enable the use of inner graphs in the lower bound framework whose technical properties are provably tight with the corresponding assumptions made in the upper bounds. As an additional application of our techniques, we improve the corresponding lower bound for $O(n)$-size additive emulators to $+\Omega(n^{1/14})$.
A dominating set of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is a subset of vertices $S\subseteq V$ such that every vertex $v\in V\setminus S$ has at least one neighbor in set $S$. The corresponding optimization problem is known to be NP-hard. The best known polynomial time approximation algorithm for the problem separates the solution process in two stages applying first a fast greedy algorithm to obtain an initial dominating set, and then it uses an iterative procedure to reduce (purify) this dominating set. The purification stage turned out to be practically efficient. Here we further strengthen the purification stage presenting four new purification algorithms. All four purification procedures outperform the earlier purification procedure. The algorithms were tested for over 1300 benchmark problem instances. Compared to the known upper bounds, the obtained solutions were about 7 times better. Remarkably, for the 500 benchmark instances for which the optimum is known, the optimal solutions were obtained for 46.33\% of the tested instances, whereas the average error for the remaining instances was about 1.01.
The target stationary distribution problem (TSDP) is the following: given an irreducible stochastic matrix $G$ and a target stationary distribution $\hat \mu$, construct a minimum norm perturbation, $\Delta$, such that $\hat G = G+\Delta$ is also stochastic and has the prescribed target stationary distribution, $\hat \mu$. In this paper, we revisit the TSDP under a constraint on the support of $\Delta$, that is, on the set of non-zero entries of $\Delta$. This is particularly meaningful in practice since one cannot typically modify all entries of $G$. We first show how to construct a feasible solution $\hat G$ that has essentially the same support as the matrix $G$. Then we show how to compute globally optimal and sparse solutions using the component-wise $\ell_1$ norm and linear optimization. We propose an efficient implementation that relies on a column-generation approach which allows us to solve sparse problems of size up to $10^5 \times 10^5$ in a few minutes. We illustrate the proposed algorithms with several numerical experiments.
Goemans and Rothvoss (SODA'14) gave a framework for solving problems in time $enc(P)^{2^{O(N)}}enc(Q)^{O(1)}$ that can be described as finding a point in $\text{int.cone}(P\cap\mathbb{Z}^N)\cap Q$, where $P,Q\subset\mathbb{R}^N$ are (bounded) polyhedra. This framework can be used to solve various scheduling problems, but the encoding length $enc(P)$ usually involves large parameters like the makespan. We describe three tools to improve the framework by Goemans and Rothvoss: Problem-specific preprocessing, LP relaxation techniques and a new bound for the number of vertices of the integer hull. In particular, applied to the classical scheduling problem $P||C_{\max}$, these tools each improve the running time from $(\log(C_{\max}))^{2^{O(d)}} enc(I)^{O(1)}$ to the possibly much better $(\log(p_{\max}))^{2^{O(d)}}enc(I)^{O(1)}$. Here, $p_{\max}$ is the largest processing time, $d$ is the number of different processing times, $C_{\max}$ is the makespan and $enc(I)$ is the encoding length of the instance. This running time is FPT w.r.t. parameter $d$ if $p_{\max}$ is given in unary. We obtain similar results for various other problems. Moreover, we show how a balancing result by Govzmann et al. can be used to speed up an additive approximation scheme by Buchem et al. (ICALP'21) in the high-multiplicity setting. On the complexity side, we use reductions from the literature to provide new parameterized lower bounds for $P||C_{\max}$ and to show that the improved running time of the additive approximation algorithm is probably optimal. Finally, we show that the big open question asked by Mnich and van Bevern (Comput. Oper. Res. '18) whether $P||C_{\max}$ is FPT w.r.t. the number of job types $d$ has the same answer as the question whether $Q||C_{\max}$ is FPT w.r.t. the number of job and machine types $d+\tau$ (all in high-multiplicity encoding). The same holds for objective $C_{\min}$.
An additive code is an $\mathbb{F}_q$-linear subspace of $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}^n$ over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$, which is not a linear subspace over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$. Linear complementary pairs(LCP) of codes have important roles in cryptography, such as increasing the speed and capacity of digital communication and strengthening security by improving the encryption necessities to resist cryptanalytic attacks. This paper studies an algebraic structure of additive complementary pairs (ACP) of codes over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$. Further, we characterize an ACP of codes in analogous generator matrices and parity check matrices. Additionally, we identify a necessary condition for an ACP of codes. Besides, we present some constructions of an ACP of codes over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ from LCP codes over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ and also from an LCP of codes over $\mathbb{F}_q$. Finally, we study the constacyclic ACP of codes over $\mathbb{F}_{q^m}$ and the counting of the constacyclic ACP of codes. As an application of our study, we consider a class of quantum codes called Entanglement Assisted Quantum Error Correcting Code (EAQEC codes). As a consequence, we derive some EAQEC codes.