Homology features of spaces which appear in many applications, for instance 3D meshes, are among the most important topological properties of these objects. Given a non-trivial cycle in a homology class, we consider the problem of computing a representative in that homology class which is optimal. We study two measures of optimality, namely, the lexicographic order of cycles (the lex-optimal cycle) and the bottleneck norm (a bottleneck-optimal cycle). We give a simple algorithm for computing the lex-optimal cycle for a 1-homology class in a surface. In contrast to this, our main result is that, in the case of 3-manifolds of size $n^2$ in the Euclidean 3-space, the problem of finding a bottleneck optimal cycle cannot be solved more efficiently than solving a system of linear equations with a $n \times n$ sparse matrix. From this reduction, we deduce several hardness results. Most notably, we show that for 3-manifolds given as a subset of the 3-space (of size $n^2$), persistent homology computations are at least as hard as matrix multiplication while ordinary homology computations can be done in $O(n^2 \log n)$ time. This is the first such distinction between these two computations. Moreover, it follows that the same disparity exists between the height persistent homology computation and general sub-level set persistent homology computation for simplicial complexes in the 3-space.
We develop a novel a posteriori error estimator for the L2 error committed by the finite element discretization of the solution of the fractional Laplacian. Our a posteriori error estimator takes advantage of the semi-discretization scheme using a rational approximation which allows to reformulate the fractional problem into a family of non-fractional parametric problems. The estimator involves applying the implicit Bank-Weiser error estimation strategy to each parametric non-fractional problem and reconstructing the fractional error through the same rational approximation used to compute the solution to the original fractional problem. We provide several numerical examples in both two and three-dimensions demonstrating the effectivity of our estimator for varying fractional powers and its ability to drive an adaptive mesh refinement strategy.
Physical systems are usually modeled by differential equations, but solving these differential equations analytically is often intractable. Instead, the differential equations can be solved numerically by discretization in a finite computational domain. The discretized equation is reduced to a large linear system, whose solution is typically found using an iterative solver. We start with an initial guess, x_0, and iterate the algorithm to obtain a sequence of solution vectors, x_m. The iterative algorithm is said to converge to solution $x$ if and only if x_m converges to $x$. Accuracy of the numerical solutions is important, especially in the design of safety critical systems such as airplanes, cars, or nuclear power plants. It is therefore important to formally guarantee that the iterative solvers converge to the "true" solution of the original differential equation. In this paper, we first formalize the necessary and sufficient conditions for iterative convergence in the Coq proof assistant. We then extend this result to two classical iterative methods: Gauss-Seidel iteration and Jacobi iteration. We formalize conditions for the convergence of the Gauss--Seidel classical iterative method, based on positive definiteness of the iterative matrix. We then formally state conditions for convergence of Jacobi iteration and instantiate it with an example to demonstrate convergence of iterative solutions to the direct solution of the linear system. We leverage recent developments of the Coq linear algebra and mathcomp library for our formalization.
In a multiple partners matching problem the agents can have multiple partners up to their capacities. In this paper we consider both the two-sided many-to-many stable matching problem and the one-sided stable fixtures problem under lexicographic preferences. We study strong core and Pareto-optimal solutions for this setting from a computational point of view. First we provide an example to show that the strong core can be empty even under these severe restrictions for many-to-many problems, and that deciding the non-emptiness of the strong core is NP-hard. We also show that for a given matching checking Pareto-optimality and the strong core properties are co-NP-complete problems for the many-to-many problem, and deciding the existence of a complete Pareto-optimal matching is also NP-hard for the fixtures problem. On the positive side, we give efficient algorithms for finding a near feasible strong core solution, where the capacities are only violated by at most one unit for each agent, and also for finding a half-matching in the strong core of fractional matchings. These polynomial time algorithms are based on the Top Trading Cycle algorithm. Finally, we also show that finding a maximum size matching that is Pareto-optimal can be done efficiently for many-to-many problems, which is in contrast with the hardness result for the fixtures problem.
We investigate the complexity of explicit construction problems, where the goal is to produce a particular object of size $n$ possessing some pseudorandom property in time polynomial in $n$. We give overwhelming evidence that $\bf{APEPP}$, defined originally by Kleinberg et al., is the natural complexity class associated with explicit constructions of objects whose existence follows from the probabilistic method, by placing a variety of such construction problems in this class. We then demonstrate that a result of Je\v{r}\'{a}bek on provability in Bounded Arithmetic, when reinterpreted as a reduction between search problems, shows that constructing a truth table of high circuit complexity is complete for $\bf{APEPP}$ under $\bf{P}^{\bf{NP}}$ reductions. This illustrates that Shannon's classical proof of the existence of hard boolean functions is in fact a $\textit{universal}$ probabilistic existence argument: derandomizing his proof implies a generic derandomization of the probabilistic method. As a corollary, we prove that $\bf{EXP}^{\bf{NP}}$ contains a language of circuit complexity $2^{n^{\Omega(1)}}$ if and only if it contains a language of circuit complexity $\frac{2^n}{2n}$. Finally, for several of the problems shown to lie in $\bf{APEPP}$, we demonstrate direct polynomial time reductions to the explicit construction of hard truth tables.
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 design accelerated algorithms with improved rates for several fundamental classes of optimization problems. Our algorithms all build upon techniques related to the analysis of primal-dual extragradient methods via relative Lipschitzness proposed recently by [CST21]. (1) Separable minimax optimization. We study separable minimax optimization problems $\min_x \max_y f(x) - g(y) + h(x, y)$, where $f$ and $g$ have smoothness and strong convexity parameters $(L^x, \mu^x)$, $(L^y, \mu^y)$, and $h$ is convex-concave with a $(\Lambda^{xx}, \Lambda^{xy}, \Lambda^{yy})$-blockwise operator norm bounded Hessian. We provide an algorithm with gradient query complexity $\tilde{O}\left(\sqrt{\frac{L^{x}}{\mu^{x}}} + \sqrt{\frac{L^{y}}{\mu^{y}}} + \frac{\Lambda^{xx}}{\mu^{x}} + \frac{\Lambda^{xy}}{\sqrt{\mu^{x}\mu^{y}}} + \frac{\Lambda^{yy}}{\mu^{y}}\right)$. Notably, for convex-concave minimax problems with bilinear coupling (e.g.\ quadratics), where $\Lambda^{xx} = \Lambda^{yy} = 0$, our rate matches a lower bound of [ZHZ19]. (2) Finite sum optimization. We study finite sum optimization problems $\min_x \frac{1}{n}\sum_{i\in[n]} f_i(x)$, where each $f_i$ is $L_i$-smooth and the overall problem is $\mu$-strongly convex. We provide an algorithm with gradient query complexity $\tilde{O}\left(n + \sum_{i\in[n]} \sqrt{\frac{L_i}{n\mu}} \right)$. Notably, when the smoothness bounds $\{L_i\}_{i\in[n]}$ are non-uniform, our rate improves upon accelerated SVRG [LMH15, FGKS15] and Katyusha [All17] by up to a $\sqrt{n}$ factor. (3) Minimax finite sums. We generalize our algorithms for minimax and finite sum optimization to solve a natural family of minimax finite sum optimization problems at an accelerated rate, encapsulating both above results up to a logarithmic factor.
We resolve an open problem posed by Joswig et al. by providing an $\tilde{O}(N)$ time, $O(\log^2(N))$-factor approximation algorithm for the min-Morse unmatched problem (MMUP) Let $\Lambda$ be the no. of critical cells of the optimal discrete Morse function and $N$ be the total no. of cells of a regular cell complex K. The goal of MMUP is to find $\Lambda$ for a given complex K. To begin with, we apply an approx. preserving graph reduction on MMUP to obtain a new problem namely the min-partial order problem (min-POP)(a strict generalization of the min-feedback arc set problem). The reduction involves introduction of rigid edges which are edges that demand strict inclusion in output solution. To solve min-POP, we use the Leighton- Rao divide-&-conquer paradigm that provides solutions to SDP-formulated instances of min-directed balanced cut with rigid edges (min-DBCRE). Our first algorithm for min-DBCRE extends Agarwal et al.'s rounding procedure for digraph formulation of ARV-algorithm to handle rigid edges. Our second algorithm to solve min-DBCRE SDP, adapts Arora et al.'s primal dual MWUM. In terms of applications, under the mild assumption1 of the size of topological features being significantly smaller compared to the size of the complex, we obtain an (a) $\tilde{O}(N)$ algorithm for computing homology groups $H_i(K,A)$ of a simplicial complex K, (where A is an arbitrary Abelian group.) (b) an $\tilde{O}(N^2)$ algorithm for computing persistent homology and (c) an $\tilde{O}(N)$ algorithm for computing the optimal discrete Morse-Witten function compatible with input scalar function as simple consequences of our approximation algorithm for MMUP thereby giving us the best known complexity bounds for each of these applications under the aforementioned assumption. Such an assumption is realistic in applied settings, and often a characteristic of modern massive datasets.
In this paper, we prove that it is W[2]-hard to approximate $k$-SetCover within any constant ratio. Our proof is built upon the recently developed threshold graph composition technique. We propose a strong notion of threshold graph and use a new composition method to prove this result. Our technique could also be applied to rule out polynomial time $o\left(\frac{\log n}{\log \log n}\right)$ ratio approximation algorithms for the non-parameterized $k$-SetCover problem, assuming W[1]$\ne$FPT. We highlight that our proof does not depend on the well-known PCP theorem, and only involves simple combinatorial objects. Furthermore, our reduction results in a $k$-SetCover instance with $k$ as small as $O\left(\log^2 n\cdot \log \log n\right)$.
Optimal transport distances have found many applications in machine learning for their capacity to compare non-parametric probability distributions. Yet their algorithmic complexity generally prevents their direct use on large scale datasets. Among the possible strategies to alleviate this issue, practitioners can rely on computing estimates of these distances over subsets of data, {\em i.e.} minibatches. While computationally appealing, we highlight in this paper some limits of this strategy, arguing it can lead to undesirable smoothing effects. As an alternative, we suggest that the same minibatch strategy coupled with unbalanced optimal transport can yield more robust behavior. We discuss the associated theoretical properties, such as unbiased estimators, existence of gradients and concentration bounds. Our experimental study shows that in challenging problems associated to domain adaptation, the use of unbalanced optimal transport leads to significantly better results, competing with or surpassing recent baselines.
In this paper, we study the optimal convergence rate for distributed convex optimization problems in networks. We model the communication restrictions imposed by the network as a set of affine constraints and provide optimal complexity bounds for four different setups, namely: the function $F(\xb) \triangleq \sum_{i=1}^{m}f_i(\xb)$ is strongly convex and smooth, either strongly convex or smooth or just convex. Our results show that Nesterov's accelerated gradient descent on the dual problem can be executed in a distributed manner and obtains the same optimal rates as in the centralized version of the problem (up to constant or logarithmic factors) with an additional cost related to the spectral gap of the interaction matrix. Finally, we discuss some extensions to the proposed setup such as proximal friendly functions, time-varying graphs, improvement of the condition numbers.