Two contrasting algorithmic paradigms for constraint satisfaction problems are successive local explorations of neighboring configurations versus producing new configurations using global information about the problem (e.g. approximating the marginals of the probability distribution which is uniform over satisfying configurations). This paper presents new algorithms for the latter framework, ultimately producing estimates for satisfying configurations using methods from Boolean Fourier analysis. The approach is broadly inspired by the quantum amplitude amplification algorithm in that it maximally increases the amplitude of the approximation function over satisfying configurations given sequential refinements. We demonstrate that satisfying solutions may be retrieved in a process analogous to quantum measurement made efficient by sparsity in the Fourier domain, and present a complete solver construction using this novel approximation. Freedom in the refinement strategy invites further opportunities to design solvers in an evolutionary computing framework. Results demonstrate competitive performance against local solvers for the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem, encouraging future work in understanding the connections between Boolean Fourier analysis and constraint satisfaction.
In this paper, we study fast first-order algorithms that approximately solve linear programs (LPs). More specifically, we apply algorithms from online linear programming to offline LPs and derive algorithms that are free of any matrix multiplication. To further improve the applicability of the proposed methods, we propose a variable-duplication technique that achieves $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{mn/K})$ optimality gap by copying each variable $K$ times. Moreover, we identify that online algorithms can be efficiently incorporated into a column generation framework for large-scale LPs. Finally, numerical experiments show that our proposed methods can be applied either as an approximate direct solver or as an initialization subroutine in frameworks of exact LP solving.
We develop a general theoretical and algorithmic framework for sparse approximation and structured prediction in $\mathcal{P}_2(\Omega)$ with Wasserstein barycenters. The barycenters are sparse in the sense that they are computed from an available dictionary of measures but the approximations only involve a reduced number of atoms. We show that the best reconstruction from the class of sparse barycenters is characterized by a notion of best $n$-term barycenter which we introduce, and which can be understood as a natural extension of the classical concept of best $n$-term approximation in Banach spaces. We show that the best $n$-term barycenter is the minimizer of a highly non-convex, bi-level optimization problem, and we develop algorithmic strategies for practical numerical computation. We next leverage this approximation tool to build interpolation strategies that involve a reduced computational cost, and that can be used for structured prediction, and metamodelling of parametrized families of measures. We illustrate the potential of the method through the specific problem of Model Order Reduction (MOR) of parametrized PDEs. Since our approach is sparse, adaptive and preserves mass by construction, it has potential to overcome known bottlenecks of classical linear methods in hyperbolic conservation laws transporting discontinuities. It also paves the way towards MOR for measure-valued PDE problems such as gradient flows.
NISQ devices have several physical limitations and unavoidable noisy quantum operations, and only small circuits can be executed on a quantum machine to get reliable results. This leads to the quantum hardware under-utilization issue. Here, we address this problem and improve the quantum hardware throughput by proposing a Quantum Multi-programming Compiler (QuMC) to execute multiple quantum circuits on quantum hardware simultaneously. This approach can also reduce the total runtime of circuits. We first introduce a parallelism manager to select an appropriate number of circuits to be executed at the same time. Second, we present two different qubit partitioning algorithms to allocate reliable partitions to multiple circuits - a greedy and a heuristic. Third, we use the Simultaneous Randomized Benchmarking protocol to characterize the crosstalk properties and consider them in the qubit partition process to avoid the crosstalk effect during simultaneous executions. Finally, we enhance the mapping transition algorithm to make circuits executable on hardware using a decreased number of inserted gates. We demonstrate the performance of our QuMC approach by executing circuits of different sizes on IBM quantum hardware simultaneously. We also investigate this method on VQE algorithm to reduce its overhead.
In this paper, we study error bounds for {\em Bayesian quadrature} (BQ), with an emphasis on noisy settings, randomized algorithms, and average-case performance measures. We seek to approximate the integral of functions in a {\em Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space} (RKHS), particularly focusing on the Mat\'ern-$\nu$ and squared exponential (SE) kernels, with samples from the function potentially being corrupted by Gaussian noise. We provide a two-step meta-algorithm that serves as a general tool for relating the average-case quadrature error with the $L^2$-function approximation error. When specialized to the Mat\'ern kernel, we recover an existing near-optimal error rate while avoiding the existing method of repeatedly sampling points. When specialized to other settings, we obtain new average-case results for settings including the SE kernel with noise and the Mat\'ern kernel with misspecification. Finally, we present algorithm-independent lower bounds that have greater generality and/or give distinct proofs compared to existing ones.
In this paper we are concerned with understanding the nature of program metrics for calculi with higher-order types, seen as natural generalizations of program equivalences. Some of the metrics we are interested in are well-known, such as those based on the interpretation of terms in metric spaces and those obtained by generalizing observational equivalence. We also introduce a new one, called the interactive metric, built by applying the well-known Int-Construction to the category of metric complete partial orders. Our aim is then to understand how these metrics relate to each other, i.e., whether and in which cases one such metric refines another, in analogy with corresponding well-studied problems about program equivalences. The results we obtain are twofold. We first show that the metrics of semantic origin, i.e., the denotational and interactive ones, lie \emph{in between} the observational and equational metrics and that in some cases, these inclusions are strict. Then, we give a result about the relationship between the denotational and interactive metrics, revealing that the former is less discriminating than the latter. All our results are given for a linear lambda-calculus, and some of them can be generalized to calculi with graded comonads, in the style of Fuzz.
Given an observational study with $n$ independent but heterogeneous units, our goal is to learn the counterfactual distribution for each unit using only one $p$-dimensional sample per unit containing covariates, interventions, and outcomes. Specifically, we allow for unobserved confounding that introduces statistical biases between interventions and outcomes as well as exacerbates the heterogeneity across units. Modeling the underlying joint distribution as an exponential family, we reduce learning the unit-level counterfactual distributions to learning $n$ exponential family distributions with heterogeneous parameters and only one sample per distribution. We introduce a convex objective that pools all $n$ samples to jointly learn all $n$ parameter vectors, and provide a unit-wise mean squared error bound that scales linearly with the metric entropy of the parameter space. For example, when the parameters are $s$-sparse linear combination of $k$ known vectors, the error is $O(s\log k/p)$. En route, we derive sufficient conditions for compactly supported distributions to satisfy the logarithmic Sobolev inequality. As an application of the framework, our results enable consistent imputation of sparsely missing covariates.
Motivated by a real-world application, we model and solve a complex staff scheduling problem. Tasks are to be assigned to workers for supervision. Multiple tasks can be covered in parallel by a single worker, with worker shifts being flexible within availabilities. Each worker has a different skill set, enabling them to cover different tasks. Tasks require assignment according to priority and skill requirements. The objective is to maximize the number of assigned tasks weighted by their priorities, while minimizing assignment penalties. We develop an adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS) algorithm, relying on tailored destroy and repair operators. It is tested on benchmark instances derived from real-world data and compared to optimal results obtained by means of a commercial MIP-solver. Furthermore, we analyze the impact of considering three additional alternative objective functions. When applied to large-scale company data, the developed ALNS outperforms the previously applied solution approach.
One of the central applications for quantum annealers is to find the solutions of Ising problems. Suitable Ising problems, however, need to be formulated such that they, on the one hand, respect the specific restrictions of the hardware and, on the other hand, represent the original problems which shall actually be solved. We evaluate sufficient requirements on such an embedded Ising problem analytically and transform them into a linear optimization problem. With an objective function aiming to minimize the maximal absolute problem parameter, the precision issues of the annealers are addressed. Due to the redundancy of several constraints, we can show that the formally exponentially large optimization problem can be reduced and finally solved in polynomial time for the standard embedding setting where the embedded vertices induce trees. This allows to formulate provably equivalent embedded Ising problems in a practical setup.
Learning causal relationships between variables is a fundamental task in causal inference and directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are a popular choice to represent the causal relationships. As one can recover a causal graph only up to its Markov equivalence class from observations, interventions are often used for the recovery task. Interventions are costly in general and it is important to design algorithms that minimize the number of interventions performed. In this work, we study the problem of identifying the smallest set of interventions required to learn the causal relationships between a subset of edges (target edges). Under the assumptions of faithfulness, causal sufficiency, and ideal interventions, we study this problem in two settings: when the underlying ground truth causal graph is known (subset verification) and when it is unknown (subset search). For the subset verification problem, we provide an efficient algorithm to compute a minimum sized interventional set; we further extend these results to bounded size non-atomic interventions and node-dependent interventional costs. For the subset search problem, in the worst case, we show that no algorithm (even with adaptivity or randomization) can achieve an approximation ratio that is asymptotically better than the vertex cover of the target edges when compared with the subset verification number. This result is surprising as there exists a logarithmic approximation algorithm for the search problem when we wish to recover the whole causal graph. To obtain our results, we prove several interesting structural properties of interventional causal graphs that we believe have applications beyond the subset verification/search problems studied here.
In large-scale systems there are fundamental challenges when centralised techniques are used for task allocation. The number of interactions is limited by resource constraints such as on computation, storage, and network communication. We can increase scalability by implementing the system as a distributed task-allocation system, sharing tasks across many agents. However, this also increases the resource cost of communications and synchronisation, and is difficult to scale. In this paper we present four algorithms to solve these problems. The combination of these algorithms enable each agent to improve their task allocation strategy through reinforcement learning, while changing how much they explore the system in response to how optimal they believe their current strategy is, given their past experience. We focus on distributed agent systems where the agents' behaviours are constrained by resource usage limits, limiting agents to local rather than system-wide knowledge. We evaluate these algorithms in a simulated environment where agents are given a task composed of multiple subtasks that must be allocated to other agents with differing capabilities, to then carry out those tasks. We also simulate real-life system effects such as networking instability. Our solution is shown to solve the task allocation problem to 6.7% of the theoretical optimal within the system configurations considered. It provides 5x better performance recovery over no-knowledge retention approaches when system connectivity is impacted, and is tested against systems up to 100 agents with less than a 9% impact on the algorithms' performance.