Comparator circuits are a natural circuit model for studying bounded fan-out computation whose power sits between nondeterministic branching programs and general circuits. Despite having been studied for nearly three decades, the first superlinear lower bound against comparator circuits was proved only recently by G\'al and Robere (ITCS 2020), who established a $\Omega((n/\log n)^{1.5})$ lower bound on the size of comparator circuits computing an explicit function of $n$ bits. In this paper, we initiate the study of average-case complexity and circuit analysis algorithms for comparator circuits. Departing from previous approaches, we exploit the technique of shrinkage under random restrictions to obtain a variety of new results for this model. Among them, we show - Average-case Lower Bounds. For every $k = k(n)$ with $k \geq \log n$, there exists a polynomial-time computable function $f_k$ on $n$ bits such that, for every comparator circuit $C$ with at most $n^{1.5}/O(k\cdot \sqrt{\log n})$ gates, we have \[ \text{Pr}_{x\in\left\{ 0,1 \right\}^n}\left[C(x)=f_k(x)\right]\leq \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{2^{\Omega(k)}}. \] This average-case lower bound matches the worst-case lower bound of G\'al and Robere by letting $k=O(\log n)$. - #SAT Algorithms. There is an algorithm that counts the number of satisfying assignments of a given comparator circuit with at most $n^{1.5}/O\!\left(k\cdot \sqrt{\log n}\right)$ gates, in time $2^{n-k}\cdot\text{poly}(n)$, for any $k\leq n/4$. The running time is non-trivial when $k=\omega(\log n)$. - Pseudorandom Generators and MCSP Lower Bounds. There is a pseudorandom generator of seed length $s^{2/3+o(1)}$ that fools comparator circuits with $s$ gates. Also, using this PRG, we obtain an $n^{1.5-o(1)}$ lower bound for MCSP against comparator circuits.
We consider problems that can be formulated as a task of finding an optimal triangulation of a graph w.r.t. some notion of optimality. We present algorithms parameterized by the size of a minimum edge clique cover ($cc$) to such problems. This parameterization occurs naturally in many problems in this setting, e.g., in the perfect phylogeny problem $cc$ is at most the number of taxa, in fractional hypertreewidth $cc$ is at most the number of hyperedges, and in treewidth of Bayesian networks $cc$ is at most the number of non-root nodes. We show that the number of minimal separators of graphs is at most $2^{cc}$, the number of potential maximal cliques is at most $3^{cc}$, and these objects can be listed in times $O^*(2^{cc})$ and $O^*(3^{cc})$, respectively, even when no edge clique cover is given as input; the $O^*(\cdot)$ notation omits factors polynomial in the input size. These enumeration algorithms imply $O^*(3^{cc})$ time algorithms for problems such as treewidth, weighted minimum fill-in, and feedback vertex set. For generalized and fractional hypertreewidth we give $O^*(4^m)$ time and $O^*(3^m)$ time algorithms, respectively, where $m$ is the number of hyperedges. When an edge clique cover of size $cc'$ is given as a part of the input we give $O^*(2^{cc'})$ time algorithms for treewidth, minimum fill-in, and chordal sandwich. This implies an $O^*(2^n)$ time algorithm for perfect phylogeny, where $n$ is the number of taxa. We also give polynomial space algorithms with time complexities $O^*(9^{cc'})$ and $O^*(9^{cc + O(\log^2 cc)})$ for problems in this framework.
The threshold theorem is a fundamental result in the theory of fault-tolerant quantum computation stating that arbitrarily long quantum computations can be performed with a polylogarithmic overhead provided the noise level is below a constant level. A recent work by Fawzi, Grospellier and Leverrier (FOCS 2018) building on a result by Gottesman (QIC 2013) has shown that the space overhead can be asymptotically reduced to a constant independent of the circuit provided we only consider circuits with a length bounded by a polynomial in the width. In this work, using a minimal model for quantum fault tolerance, we establish a general lower bound on the space overhead required to achieve fault tolerance. For any non-unitary qubit channel $\mathcal{N}$ and any quantum fault tolerance schemes against $\mathrm{i.i.d.}$ noise modeled by $\mathcal{N}$, we prove a lower bound of $\max\left\{\mathrm{Q}(\mathcal{N})^{-1}n,\alpha_\mathcal{N} \log T\right\}$ on the number of physical qubits, for circuits of length $T$ and width $n$. Here, $\mathrm{Q}(\mathcal{N})$ denotes the quantum capacity of $\mathcal{N}$ and $\alpha_\mathcal{N}>0$ is a constant only depending on the channel $\mathcal{N}$. In our model, we allow for qubits to be replaced by fresh ones during the execution of the circuit and we allow classical computation to be free and perfect. This improves upon results that assumed classical computations to be also affected by noise, and that sometimes did not allow for fresh qubits to be added. Along the way, we prove an exponential upper bound on the maximal length of fault-tolerant quantum computation with amplitude damping noise resolving a conjecture by Ben-Or, Gottesman, and Hassidim (2013).
Shuffle model of differential privacy is a novel distributed privacy model based on a combination of local privacy mechanisms and a secure shuffler. It has been shown that the additional randomisation provided by the shuffler improves privacy bounds compared to the purely local mechanisms. Accounting tight bounds, however, is complicated by the complexity brought by the shuffler. The recently proposed numerical techniques for evaluating $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differential privacy guarantees have been shown to give tighter bounds than commonly used methods for compositions of various complex mechanisms. In this paper, we show how to obtain accurate bounds for adaptive compositions of general $\varepsilon$-LDP shufflers using the analysis by Feldman et al. (2021) and tight bounds for adaptive compositions of shufflers of $k$-randomised response mechanisms, using the analysis by Balle et al. (2019). We show how to speed up the evaluation of the resulting privacy loss distribution from $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(n)$, where $n$ is the number of users, without noticeable change in the resulting $\delta(\varepsilon)$-upper bounds. We also demonstrate looseness of the existing bounds and methods found in the literature, improving previous composition results significantly.
We propose quantum subroutines for the simplex method that avoid classical computation of the basis inverse. We show how to quantize all steps of the simplex algorithm, including checking optimality, unboundedness, and identifying a pivot (i.e., pricing the columns and performing the ratio test) according to Dantzig's rule or the steepest edge rule. The quantized subroutines obtain a polynomial speedup in the dimension of the problem, but have worse dependence on other numerical parameters. For example, for a problem with $m$ constraints, $n$ variables, at most $d_c$ nonzero elements per column of the costraint matrix, at most $d$ nonzero elements per column or row of the basis, basis condition number $\kappa$, and optimality tolerance $\epsilon$, pricing can be performed in $\tilde{O}(\frac{1}{\epsilon}\kappa d \sqrt{n}(d_c n + d m))$ time, where the $\tilde{O}$ notation hides polylogarithmic factors; classically, pricing requires $O(d_c^{0.7} m^{1.9} + m^{2 + o(1)} + d_c n)$ time in the worst case using the fastest known algorithm for sparse matrix multiplication. For well-conditioned sparse problems the quantum subroutines scale better in $m$ and $n$, and may therefore have an advantage for very large problems. The running time of the quantum subroutines can be improved if the constraint matrix admits an efficient algorithmic description, or if quantum RAM is available.
We propose throughput and cost optimal job scheduling algorithms in cloud computing platforms offering Infrastructure as a Service. We first consider online migration and propose job scheduling algorithms to minimize job migration and server running costs. We consider algorithms that assume knowledge of job-size on arrival of jobs. We characterize the optimal cost subject to system stability. We develop a drift-plus-penalty framework based algorithm that can achieve optimal cost arbitrarily closely. Specifically this algorithm yields a trade-off between delay and costs. We then relax the job-size knowledge assumption and give an algorithm that uses readily offered service to the jobs. We show that this algorithm gives order-wise identical cost as the job size based algorithm. Later, we consider offline job migration that incurs migration delays. We again present throughput optimal algorithms that minimize server running cost. We illustrate the performance of the proposed algorithms and compare these to the existing algorithms via simulation.
In this paper, we revisit the regret minimization problem in sparse stochastic contextual linear bandits, where feature vectors may be of large dimension $d$, but where the reward function depends on a few, say $s_0\ll d$, of these features only. We present Thresholded Lasso bandit, an algorithm that (i) estimates the vector defining the reward function as well as its sparse support, i.e., significant feature elements, using the Lasso framework with thresholding, and (ii) selects an arm greedily according to this estimate projected on its support. The algorithm does not require prior knowledge of the sparsity index $s_0$ and can be parameter-free. For this simple algorithm, we establish non-asymptotic regret upper bounds scaling as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T} )$ in general, and as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \log T)$ under the so-called margin condition (a probabilistic condition on the separation of the arm rewards). The regret of previous algorithms scales as $\mathcal{O}( \log d + \sqrt{T \log (d T)})$ and $\mathcal{O}( \log T \log d)$ in the two settings, respectively. Through numerical experiments, we confirm that our algorithm outperforms existing methods.
We present an algorithm for the maximum matching problem in dynamic (insertion-deletions) streams with *asymptotically optimal* space complexity: for any $n$-vertex graph, our algorithm with high probability outputs an $\alpha$-approximate matching in a single pass using $O(n^2/\alpha^3)$ bits of space. A long line of work on the dynamic streaming matching problem has reduced the gap between space upper and lower bounds first to $n^{o(1)}$ factors [Assadi-Khanna-Li-Yaroslavtsev; SODA 2016] and subsequently to $\text{polylog}{(n)}$ factors [Dark-Konrad; CCC 2020]. Our upper bound now matches the Dark-Konrad lower bound up to $O(1)$ factors, thus completing this research direction. Our approach consists of two main steps: we first (provably) identify a family of graphs, similar to the instances used in prior work to establish the lower bounds for this problem, as the only "hard" instances to focus on. These graphs include an induced subgraph which is both sparse and contains a large matching. We then design a dynamic streaming algorithm for this family of graphs which is more efficient than prior work. The key to this efficiency is a novel sketching method, which bypasses the typical loss of $\text{polylog}{(n)}$-factors in space compared to standard $L_0$-sampling primitives, and can be of independent interest in designing optimal algorithms for other streaming problems.
This paper considers the problem of matrix-variate logistic regression. It derives the fundamental error threshold on estimating low-rank coefficient matrices in the logistic regression problem by obtaining a lower bound on the minimax risk. The bound depends explicitly on the dimension and distribution of the covariates, the rank and energy of the coefficient matrix, and the number of samples. The resulting bound is proportional to the intrinsic degrees of freedom in the problem, which suggests the sample complexity of the low-rank matrix logistic regression problem can be lower than that for vectorized logistic regression. The proof techniques utilized in this work also set the stage for development of minimax lower bounds for tensor-variate logistic regression problems.
Universal fault-tolerant quantum computers will require the use of efficient protocols to implement encoded operations necessary in the execution of algorithms. In this work, we show how SMT solvers can be used to automate the construction of Clifford circuits with certain fault-tolerance properties and apply our techniques to a fault-tolerant magic state preparation protocol. Part of the protocol requires converting magic states encoded in the color code to magic states encoded in the surface code. Since the teleportation step involves decoding a color code merged with a surface code, we develop a new decoding algorithm applicable to such codes.
We prove a bound of $O( k (n+m)\log^{d-1})$ on the number of incidences between $n$ points and $m$ axis parallel boxes in $\mathbb{R}^d$, if no $k$ boxes contain $k$ common points. That is, the incidence graph between the points and the boxes does not contain $K_{k,k}$ as a subgraph. This new bound improves over previous work by a factor of $\log^d n$, for $d >2$. We also study other variants of the problem. For halfspaces, using shallow cuttings, we get a near linear bound in two and three dimensions. Finally, we present near linear bound for the case of shapes in the plane with low union complexity (e.g. fat triangles).