The Hilbert metric is a distance function defined for points lying within a convex body. It generalizes the Cayley-Klein model of hyperbolic geometry to any convex set, and it has numerous applications in the analysis and processing of convex bodies. In this paper, we study the geometric and combinatorial properties of the Voronoi diagram of a set of point sites under the Hilbert metric. Given any convex polygon $K$ bounded by $m$ sides, we present two algorithms (one randomized and one deterministic) for computing the Voronoi diagram of an $n$-element point set in the Hilbert metric induced by $K$. Our randomized algorithm runs in $O(m n + n (\log n)(\log m n))$ expected time, and our deterministic algorithm runs in time $O(m n \log n)$. Both algorithms use $O(m n)$ space. We show that the worst-case combinatorial complexity of the Voronoi diagram is $\Theta(m n)$.
In this paper, we propose GT-GDA, a distributed optimization method to solve saddle point problems of the form: $\min_{\mathbf{x}} \max_{\mathbf{y}} \{F(\mathbf{x},\mathbf{y}) :=G(\mathbf{x}) + \langle \mathbf{y}, \overline{P} \mathbf{x} \rangle - H(\mathbf{y})\}$, where the functions $G(\cdot)$, $H(\cdot)$, and the the coupling matrix $\overline{P}$ are distributed over a strongly connected network of nodes. GT-GDA is a first-order method that uses gradient tracking to eliminate the dissimilarity caused by heterogeneous data distribution among the nodes. In the most general form, GT-GDA includes a consensus over the local coupling matrices to achieve the optimal (unique) saddle point, however, at the expense of increased communication. To avoid this, we propose a more efficient variant GT-GDA-Lite that does not incur the additional communication and analyze its convergence in various scenarios. We show that GT-GDA converges linearly to the unique saddle point solution when $G(\cdot)$ is smooth and convex, $H(\cdot)$ is smooth and strongly convex, and the global coupling matrix $\overline{P}$ has full column rank. We further characterize the regime under which GT-GDA exhibits a network topology-independent convergence behavior. We next show the linear convergence of GT-GDA to an error around the unique saddle point, which goes to zero when the coupling cost ${\langle \mathbf y, \overline{P} \mathbf x \rangle}$ is common to all nodes, or when $G(\cdot)$ and $H(\cdot)$ are quadratic. Numerical experiments illustrate the convergence properties and importance of GT-GDA and GT-GDA-Lite for several applications.
In this paper we study paramertized motion planning algorithms which provide universal and flexible solutions to diverse motion planning problems. Such algorithms are intended to function under a variety of external conditions which are viewed as parameters and serve as part of the input of the algorithm. Continuing a recent paper, we study further the concept of parametrized topological complexity. We analyse in full detail the problem of controlling a swarm of robots in the presence of multiple obstacles in Euclidean space which served for us a natural motivating example. We present an explicit parametrized motion planning algorithm solving the motion planning problem for any number of robots and obstacles.. This algorithm is optimal, it has minimal possible topological complexity for any d odd. We also analyse the parametrized topological complexity of sphere bundles using the Stiefel - Whitney characteristic classes.
The problem of finding a nonzero solution of a linear recurrence $Ly = 0$ with polynomial coefficients where $y$ has the form of a definite hypergeometric sum, related to the Inverse Creative Telescoping Problem of [14][Sec. 8], has now been open for three decades. Here we present an algorithm (implemented in a SageMath package) which, given such a recurrence and a quasi-triangular, shift-compatible factorial basis $\mathcal{B} = \langle P_k(n)\rangle_{k=0}^\infty$ of the polynomial space $\mathbb{K}[n]$ over a field $\mathbb{K}$ of characteristic zero, computes a recurrence satisfied by the coefficient sequence $c = \langle c_k\rangle_{k=0}^\infty$ of the solution $y_n = \sum_{k=0}^\infty c_kP_k(n)$ (where, thanks to the quasi-triangularity of $\mathcal{B}$, the sum on the right terminates for each $n \in \mathbb{N}$). More generally, if $\mathcal{B}$ is $m$-sieved for some $m \in \mathbb{N}$, our algorithm computes a system of $m$ recurrences satisfied by the $m$-sections of the coefficient sequence $c$. If an explicit nonzero solution of this system can be found, we obtain an explicit nonzero solution of $Ly = 0$.
In this work, we examine sampling problems with non-smooth potentials. We propose a novel Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from non-smooth potentials. We provide a non-asymptotical analysis of our algorithm and establish a polynomial-time complexity $\tilde {\cal O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ to obtain $\varepsilon$ total variation distance to the target density, better than most existing results under the same assumptions. Our method is based on the proximal bundle method and an alternating sampling framework. This framework requires the so-called restricted Gaussian oracle, which can be viewed as a sampling counterpart of the proximal mapping in convex optimization. One key contribution of this work is a fast algorithm that realizes the restricted Gaussian oracle for any convex non-smooth potential with bounded Lipschitz constant.
Let $G=(V,E)$ be an undirected unweighted planar graph. Consider a vector storing the distances from an arbitrary vertex $v$ to all vertices $S = \{ s_1 , s_2 , \ldots , s_k \}$ of a single face in their cyclic order. The pattern of $v$ is obtained by taking the difference between every pair of consecutive values of this vector. In STOC'19, Li and Parter used a VC-dimension argument to show that in planar graphs, the number of distinct patterns, denoted $x$, is only $O(k^3)$. This resulted in a simple compression scheme requiring $\tilde O(\min \{ k^4+|T|, k\cdot |T|\})$ space to encode the distances between $S$ and a subset of terminal vertices $T \subseteq V$. This is known as the Okamura-Seymour metric compression problem. We give an alternative proof of the $x=O(k^3)$ bound that exploits planarity beyond the VC-dimension argument. Namely, our proof relies on cut-cycle duality, as well as on the fact that distances among vertices of $S$ are bounded by $k$. Our method implies the following: (1) An $\tilde{O}(x+k+|T|)$ space compression of the Okamura-Seymour metric, thus improving the compression of Li and Parter to $\tilde O(\min \{k^3+|T|,k \cdot |T| \})$. (2) An optimal $\tilde{O}(k+|T|)$ space compression of the Okamura-Seymour metric, in the case where the vertices of $T$ induce a connected component in $G$. (3) A tight bound of $x = \Theta(k^2)$ for the family of Halin graphs, whereas the VC-dimension argument is limited to showing $x=O(k^3)$.
We are concerned with the problem of decomposing the parameter space of a parametric system of polynomial equations, and possibly some polynomial inequality constraints, with respect to the number of real solutions that the system attains. Previous studies apply a two step approach to this problem, where first the discriminant variety of the system is computed via a Groebner Basis (GB), and then a Cylindrical Algebraic Decomposition (CAD) of this is produced to give the desired computation. However, even on some reasonably small applied examples this process is too expensive, with computation of the discriminant variety alone infeasible. In this paper we develop new approaches to build the discriminant variety using resultant methods (the Dixon resultant and a new method using iterated univariate resultants). This reduces the complexity compared to GB and allows for a previous infeasible example to be tackled. We demonstrate the benefit by giving a symbolic solution to a problem from population dynamics -- the analysis of the steady states of three connected populations which exhibit Allee effects - which previously could only be tackled numerically.
Park et al. [TCS 2020] observed that the similarity between two (numerical) strings can be captured by the Cartesian trees: The Cartesian tree of a string is a binary tree recursively constructed by picking up the smallest value of the string as the root of the tree. Two strings of equal length are said to Cartesian-tree match if their Cartesian trees are isomorphic. Park et al. [TCS 2020] introduced the following Cartesian tree substring matching (CTMStr) problem: Given a text string $T$ of length $n$ and a pattern string of length $m$, find every consecutive substring $S = T[i..j]$ of a text string $T$ such that $S$ and $P$ Cartesian-tree match. They showed how to solve this problem in $\tilde{O}(n+m)$ time. In this paper, we introduce the Cartesian tree subsequence matching (CTMSeq) problem, that asks to find every minimal substring $S = T[i..j]$ of $T$ such that $S$ contains a subsequence $S'$ which Cartesian-tree matches $P$. We prove that the CTMSeq problem can be solved efficiently, in $O(m n p(n))$ time, where $p(n)$ denotes the update/query time for dynamic predecessor queries. By using a suitable dynamic predecessor data structure, we obtain $O(mn \log \log n)$-time $O(n \log m)$-space solution for CTMSeq. This contrasts CTMSeq with closely related order-preserving subsequence matching (OPMSeq) which was shown to be NP-hard by Bose et al. [IPL 1998].
This paper considers adaptive, minimax estimation of a quadratic functional in a nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) model, which is an important problem in optimal estimation of a nonlinear functional of an ill-posed inverse regression with an unknown operator. We first show that a leave-one-out, sieve NPIV estimator of the quadratic functional can attain a convergence rate that coincides with the lower bound previously derived in Chen and Christensen [2018]. The minimax rate is achieved by the optimal choice of the sieve dimension (a key tuning parameter) that depends on the smoothness of the NPIV function and the degree of ill-posedness, both are unknown in practice. We next propose a Lepski-type data-driven choice of the key sieve dimension adaptive to the unknown NPIV model features. The adaptive estimator of the quadratic functional is shown to attain the minimax optimal rate in the severely ill-posed case and in the regular mildly ill-posed case, but up to a multiplicative $\sqrt{\log n}$ factor in the irregular mildly ill-posed case.
In this paper, we develop local expansions for the ratio of the centered matrix-variate $T$ density to the centered matrix-variate normal density with the same covariances. The approximations are used to derive upper bounds on several probability metrics (such as the total variation and Hellinger distance) between the corresponding induced measures.
The problem of Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search is fundamental in computer science and has benefited from significant progress in the past couple of decades. However, most work has been devoted to pointsets whereas complex shapes have not been sufficiently treated. Here, we focus on distance functions between discretized curves in Euclidean space: they appear in a wide range of applications, from road segments to time-series in general dimension. For $\ell_p$-products of Euclidean metrics, for any $p$, we design simple and efficient data structures for ANN, based on randomized projections, which are of independent interest. They serve to solve proximity problems under a notion of distance between discretized curves, which generalizes both discrete Fr\'echet and Dynamic Time Warping distances. These are the most popular and practical approaches to comparing such curves. We offer the first data structures and query algorithms for ANN with arbitrarily good approximation factor, at the expense of increasing space usage and preprocessing time over existing methods. Query time complexity is comparable or significantly improved by our algorithms, our algorithm is especially efficient when the length of the curves is bounded.