In this paper, we show that, given two down-sets (simplicial complexes) there is a matching between them that matches disjoint sets and covers the smaller of the two down-sets. This result generalizes an unpublished result of Berge from circa 1980. The result has nice corollaries for cross-intersecting families and Chv\'atal's conjecture. More concretely, we show that Chv\'atal's conjecture is true for intersecting families with covering number $2$. A family $\mathcal F\subset 2^{[n]}$ is intersection-union (IU) if for any $A,B\in\mathcal F$ we have $1\le |A\cap B|\le n-1$. Using the aforementioned result, we derive several exact product- and sum-type results for IU-families.
The Exact Circular Pattern Matching (ECPM) problem consists of reporting every occurrence of a rotation of a pattern $P$ in a text $T$. In many real-world applications, specifically in computational biology, circular rotations are of interest because of their prominence in virus DNA. Thus, given no restrictions on pre-processing time, how quickly all such circular rotation occurrences is of interest to many areas of study. We highlight, to the best of our knowledge, a novel approach to the ECPM problem and present four data structures that accompany this approach, each with their own time-space trade-offs, in addition to experimental results to determine the most computationally feasible data structure.
The basic goal of survivable network design is to build cheap networks that guarantee the connectivity of certain pairs of nodes despite the failure of a few edges or nodes. A celebrated result by Jain [Combinatorica'01] provides a 2-approximation for a wide class of these problems. However nothing better is known even for very basic special cases, raising the natural question whether any improved approximation factor is possible at all. In this paper we address one of the most basic problems in this family for which 2 is still the best-known approximation factor, the Forest Augmentation Problem (FAP): given an undirected unweighted graph (that w.l.o.g. is a forest) and a collection of extra edges (links), compute a minimum cardinality subset of links whose addition to the graph makes it 2-edge-connected. Several better-than-2 approximation algorithms are known for the special case where the input graph is a tree, a.k.a. the Tree Augmentation Problem (TAP). Recently this was achieved also for the weighted version of TAP, and for the k-edge-connectivity generalization of TAP. These results heavily exploit the fact that the input graph is connected, a condition that does not hold in FAP. In this paper we breach the 2-approximation barrier for FAP. Our result is based on two main ingredients. First, we describe a reduction to the Path Augmentation Problem (PAP), the special case of FAP where the input graph is a collection of disjoint paths. Our reduction is not approximation preserving, however it is sufficiently accurate to improve on a factor 2 approximation. Second, we present a better-than-2 approximation algorithm for PAP, an open problem on its own. Here we exploit a novel notion of implicit credits which might turn out to be helpful in future related work.
We previously proposed the first nontrivial examples of a code having support $t$-designs for all weights obtained from the Assmus-Mattson theorem and having support $t'$-designs for some weights with some $t'>t$. This suggests the possibility of generalizing the Assmus-Mattson theorem, which is very important in design and coding theory. In the present paper, we generalize this example as a strengthening of the Assmus-Mattson theorem along this direction. As a corollary, we provide a new characterization of the extended Golay code $\mathcal{G}_{24}$.
Stable matchings have been studied extensively in social choice literature. The focus has been mostly on integral matchings, in which the nodes on the two sides are wholly matched. A fractional matching, which is a convex combination of integral matchings, is a natural extension of integral matchings. The topic of stability of fractional matchings has started receiving attention only very recently. Further, incentive compatibility in the context of fractional matchings has received very little attention. With this as the backdrop, our paper studies the important topic of incentive compatibility of mechanisms to find stable fractional matchings. We work with preferences expressed in the form of cardinal utilities. Our first result is an impossibility result that there are matching instances for which no mechanism that produces a stable fractional matching can be incentive compatible or even approximately incentive compatible. This provides the motivation to seek special classes of matching instances for which there exist incentive compatible mechanisms that produce stable fractional matchings. Our study leads to a class of matching instances that admit unique stable fractional matchings. We first show that a unique stable fractional matching for a matching instance exists if and only if the given matching instance satisfies the conditional mutual first preference (CMFP) property. To this end, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that makes ingenious use of envy-graphs to find a non-integral stable matching whenever the preferences are strict and the given instance is not a CMFP matching instance. For this class of CMFP matching instances, we prove that every mechanism that produces the unique stable fractional matching is (a) incentive compatible and further (b) resistant to coalitional manipulations.
In this paper, we propose a depth-first search (DFS) algorithm for searching maximum matchings in general graphs. Unlike blossom shrinking algorithms, which store all possible alternative alternating paths in the super-vertices shrunk from blossoms, the newly proposed algorithm does not involve blossom shrinking. The basic idea is to deflect the alternating path when facing blossoms. The algorithm maintains detour information in an auxiliary stack to minimize the redundant data structures. A benefit of our technique is to avoid spending time on shrinking and expanding blossoms. This DFS algorithm can determine a maximum matching of a general graph with $m$ edges and $n$ vertices in $O(mn)$ time with space complexity $O(n)$.
We study the problem of testing whether a function $f: \mathbb{R}^n \to \mathbb{R}$ is a polynomial of degree at most $d$ in the \emph{distribution-free} testing model. Here, the distance between functions is measured with respect to an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$ over $\mathbb{R}^n$ from which we can draw samples. In contrast to previous work, we do not assume that $\mathcal{D}$ has finite support. We design a tester that given query access to $f$, and sample access to $\mathcal{D}$, makes $(d/\varepsilon)^{O(1)}$ many queries to $f$, accepts with probability $1$ if $f$ is a polynomial of degree $d$, and rejects with probability at least $2/3$ if every degree-$d$ polynomial $P$ disagrees with $f$ on a set of mass at least $\varepsilon$ with respect to $\mathcal{D}$. Our result also holds under mild assumptions when we receive only a polynomial number of bits of precision for each query to $f$, or when $f$ can only be queried on rational points representable using a logarithmic number of bits. Along the way, we prove a new stability theorem for multivariate polynomials that may be of independent interest.
In this paper we describe two simple, fast, space-efficient algorithms for finding all matches of an indeterminate pattern $\s{p} = \s{p}[1..m]$ in an indeterminate string $\s{x} = \s{x}[1..n]$, where both \s{p} and \s{x} are defined on a "small" ordered alphabet $\Sigma$ -- say, $\sigma = |\Sigma| \le 9$. Both algorithms depend on a preprocessing phase that replaces $\Sigma$ by an integer alphabet $\Sigma_I$ of size $\sigma_I = \sigma$ which (reversibly, in time linear in string length) maps both \s{x} and \s{p} into equivalent regular strings \s{y} and \s{q}, respectively, on $\Sigma_I$, whose maximum (indeterminate) letter can be expressed in a 32-bit word (for $\sigma \le 4$, thus for DNA sequences, an 8-bit representation suffices). We first describe an efficient version \textsc{KMP\_Indet} of the venerable Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm to find all occurrences of \s{q} in \s{y} (that is, of \s{p} in \s{x}), but, whenever necessary, using the prefix array, rather than the border array, to control shifts of the transformed pattern \s{q} along the transformed string \s{y}. %Although requiring $\O(m^2n)$ time in the theoretical worst case, in cases of practical interest \textsc{KMP\_Indet} executes in $\O(n)$ time. We go on to describe a similar efficient version \textsc{BM\_Indet} of the Boyer-Moore algorithm that turns out to execute significantly faster than \textsc{KMP\_Indet} over a wide range of test cases. %A noteworthy feature is that both algorithms require very little additional space: $\Theta(m)$ words. We conjecture that a similar approach may yield practical and efficient indeterminate equivalents to other well-known pattern-matching algorithms, in particular the several variants of Boyer-Moore.
Categorical probability has recently seen significant advances through the formalism of Markov categories, within which several classical theorems have been proven in entirely abstract categorical terms. Closely related to Markov categories are gs-monoidal categories, also known as CD categories. These omit a condition that implements the normalization of probability. Extending work of Corradini and Gadducci, we construct free gs-monoidal and free Markov categories generated by a collection of morphisms of arbitrary arity and coarity. For free gs-monoidal categories, this comes in the form of an explicit combinatorial description of their morphisms as structured cospans of labeled hypergraphs. These can be thought of as a formalization of gs-monoidal string diagrams ($=$term graphs) as a combinatorial data structure. We formulate the appropriate $2$-categorical universal property based on ideas of Walters and prove that our categories satisfy it. We expect our free categories to be relevant for computer implementations and we also argue that they can be used as statistical causal models generalizing Bayesian networks.
Recent works have derived neural networks with online correlation-based learning rules to perform \textit{kernel similarity matching}. These works applied existing linear similarity matching algorithms to nonlinear features generated with random Fourier methods. In this paper attempt to perform kernel similarity matching by directly learning the nonlinear features. Our algorithm proceeds by deriving and then minimizing an upper bound for the sum of squared errors between output and input kernel similarities. The construction of our upper bound leads to online correlation-based learning rules which can be implemented with a 1 layer recurrent neural network. In addition to generating high-dimensional linearly separable representations, we show that our upper bound naturally yields representations which are sparse and selective for specific input patterns. We compare the approximation quality of our method to neural random Fourier method and variants of the popular but non-biological "Nystr{\"o}m" method for approximating the kernel matrix. Our method appears to be comparable or better than randomly sampled Nystr{\"o}m methods when the outputs are relatively low dimensional (although still potentially higher dimensional than the inputs) but less faithful when the outputs are very high dimensional.
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 and $O(n \log m)$-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].