A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), $\textsf{Max-CSP}(\mathcal{F})$, is specified by a finite set of constraints $\mathcal{F} \subseteq \{[q]^k \to \{0,1\}\}$ for positive integers $q$ and $k$. An instance of the problem on $n$ variables is given by $m$ applications of constraints from $\mathcal{F}$ to subsequences of the $n$ variables, and the goal is to find an assignment to the variables that satisfies the maximum number of constraints. In the $(\gamma,\beta)$-approximation version of the problem for parameters $0 \leq \beta < \gamma \leq 1$, the goal is to distinguish instances where at least $\gamma$ fraction of the constraints can be satisfied from instances where at most $\beta$ fraction of the constraints can be satisfied. In this work we consider the approximability of this problem in the context of sketching algorithms and give a dichotomy result. Specifically, for every family $\mathcal{F}$ and every $\beta < \gamma$, we show that either a linear sketching algorithm solves the problem in polylogarithmic space, or the problem is not solvable by any sketching algorithm in $o(\sqrt{n})$ space.
In the Strip Packing problem (SP), we are given a vertical half-strip $[0,W]\times[0,\infty)$ and a set of $n$ axis-aligned rectangles of width at most $W$. The goal is to find a non-overlapping packing of all rectangles into the strip such that the height of the packing is minimized. A well-studied and frequently used practical constraint is to allow only those packings that are guillotine separable, i.e., every rectangle in the packing can be obtained by recursively applying a sequence of edge-to-edge axis-parallel cuts (guillotine cuts) that do not intersect any item of the solution. In this paper, we study approximation algorithms for the Guillotine Strip Packing problem (GSP), i.e., the Strip Packing problem where we require additionally that the packing needs to be guillotine separable. This problem generalizes the classical Bin Packing problem and also makespan minimization on identical machines, and thus it is already strongly NP-hard. Moreover, due to a reduction from the Partition problem, it is NP-hard to obtain a polynomial-time $(3/2-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for GSP for any $\varepsilon>0$ (exactly as Strip Packing). We provide a matching polynomial time $(3/2+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for GSP. Furthermore, we present a pseudo-polynomial time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for GSP. This is surprising as it is NP-hard to obtain a $(5/4-\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for (general) Strip Packing in pseudo-polynomial time. Thus, our results essentially settle the approximability of GSP for both the polynomial and the pseudo-polynomial settings.
Consider a matrix $\mathbf{F} \in \mathbb{K}^{m \times n}$ of univariate polynomials over a field~$\mathbb{K}$. We study the problem of computing the column rank profile of $\mathbf{F}$. To this end we first give an algorithm which improves the minimal kernel basis algorithm of Zhou, Labahn, and Storjohann (Proceedings ISSAC 2012). We then provide a second algorithm which computes the column rank profile of $\mathbf{F}$ with a rank-sensitive complexity of $O\tilde{~}(r^{\omega-2} n (m+D))$ operations in $\mathbb{K}$. Here, $D$ is the sum of row degrees of $\mathbf{F}$, $\omega$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication, and $O\tilde{~}(\cdot)$ hides logarithmic factors.
The scope of this paper is the analysis and approximation of an optimal control problem related to the Allen-Cahn equation. A tracking functional is minimized subject to the Allen-Cahn equation using distributed controls that satisfy point-wise control constraints. First and second order necessary and sufficient conditions are proved. The lowest order discontinuous Galerkin - in time - scheme is considered for the approximation of the control to state and adjoint state mappings. Under a suitable restriction on maximum size of the temporal and spatial discretization parameters $k$, $h$ respectively in terms of the parameter $\epsilon$ that describes the thickness of the interface layer, a-priori estimates are proved with constants depending polynomially upon $1/ \epsilon$. Unlike to previous works for the uncontrolled Allen-Cahn problem our approach does not rely on a construction of an approximation of the spectral estimate, and as a consequence our estimates are valid under low regularity assumptions imposed by the optimal control setting. These estimates are also valid in cases where the solution and its discrete approximation do not satisfy uniform space-time bounds independent of $\epsilon$. These estimates and a suitable localization technique, via the second order condition (see \cite{Arada-Casas-Troltzsch_2002,Casas-Mateos-Troltzsch_2005,Casas-Raymond_2006,Casas-Mateos-Raymond_2007}), allows to prove error estimates for the difference between local optimal controls and their discrete approximation as well as between the associated state and adjoint state variables and their discrete approximations
In this paper, we study the computational complexity of the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) problem under the functional problem FP^NP categorization. We focus on four sub-classes: (1) When all coefficients are integers QUBO is FP^NP-complete. (2) When every coefficient is an integer lower bounded by a constant k, QUBO is FP^NP[log]-complete. (3) When every coefficient is an integer upper bounded by a constant k, QUBO is again FP^NP[log]-complete. (4) When coefficients can only be in the set {1, 0, -1}, QUBO is FP^NP[log]-complete. With recent results in quantum annealing able to solve QUBO problems efficiently, our results provide a clear connection between quantum annealing algorithms and the FP^NP complexity class categorization. We also study the computational complexity of the decision version of the QUBO problem with integer coefficients. We prove that this problem is DP-complete.
We study the computational complexity of two hard problems on determinantal point processes (DPPs). One is maximum a posteriori (MAP) inference, i.e., to find a principal submatrix having the maximum determinant. The other is probabilistic inference on exponentiated DPPs (E-DPPs), which can sharpen or weaken the diversity preference of DPPs with an exponent parameter $p$. We present several complexity-theoretic hardness results that explain the difficulty in approximating MAP inference and the normalizing constant for E-DPPs. We first prove that unconstrained MAP inference for an $n \times n$ matrix is $\textsf{NP}$-hard to approximate within a factor of $2^{\beta n}$, where $\beta = 10^{-10^{13}} $. This result improves upon the best-known inapproximability factor of $(\frac{9}{8}-\epsilon)$, and rules out the existence of any polynomial-factor approximation algorithm assuming $\textsf{P} \neq \textsf{NP}$. We then show that log-determinant maximization is $\textsf{NP}$-hard to approximate within a factor of $\frac{5}{4}$ for the unconstrained case and within a factor of $1+10^{-10^{13}}$ for the size-constrained monotone case. In particular, log-determinant maximization does not admit a polynomial-time approximation scheme unless $\textsf{P} = \textsf{NP}$. As a corollary of the first result, we demonstrate that the normalizing constant for E-DPPs of any (fixed) constant exponent $p \geq \beta^{-1} = 10^{10^{13}}$ is $\textsf{NP}$-hard to approximate within a factor of $2^{\beta pn}$, which is in contrast to the case of $p \leq 1$ admitting a fully polynomial-time randomized approximation scheme.
We propose a model for online graph problems where algorithms are given access to an oracle that predicts (e.g., based on past data) the degrees of nodes in the graph. Within this model, we study the classic problem of online bipartite matching, and a natural greedy matching algorithm called MinPredictedDegree, which uses predictions of the degrees of offline nodes. For the bipartite version of a stochastic graph model due to Chung, Lu, and Vu where the expected values of the offline degrees are known and used as predictions, we show that MinPredictedDegree stochastically dominates any other online algorithm, i.e., it is optimal for graphs drawn from this model. Since the "symmetric" version of the model, where all online nodes are identical, is a special case of the well-studied "known i.i.d. model", it follows that the competitive ratio of MinPredictedDegree on such inputs is at least 0.7299. For the special case of graphs with power law degree distributions, we show that MinPredictedDegree frequently produces matchings almost as large as the true maximum matching on such graphs. We complement these results with an extensive empirical evaluation showing that MinPredictedDegree compares favorably to state-of-the-art online algorithms for online matching.
We consider the problem of computing the topology and describing the geometry of a parametric curve in $\mathbb{R}^n$. We present an algorithm, PTOPO, that constructs an abstract graph that is isotopic to the curve in the embedding space. Our method exploits the benefits of the parametric representation and does not resort to implicitization. Most importantly, we perform all computations in the parameter space and not in the implicit space. When the parametrization involves polynomials of degree at most $d$ and maximum bitsize of coefficients $\tau$, then the worst case bit complexity of PTOPO is $ \tilde{\mathcal{O}}_B(nd^6+nd^5\tau+d^4(n^2+n\tau)+d^3(n^2\tau+ n^3)+n^3d^2\tau)$. This bound matches the current record bound $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}_B(d^6+d^5\tau)$ for the problem of computing the topology of a plane algebraic curve given in implicit form. For plane and space curves, if $N = \max\{d, \tau \}$, the complexity of PTOPO becomes $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}_B(N^6)$, which improves the state-of-the-art result, due to Alc\'azar and D\'iaz-Toca [CAGD'10], by a factor of $N^{10}$. In the same time complexity, we obtain a graph whose straight-line embedding is isotopic to the curve. However, visualizing the curve on top of the abstract graph construction, increases the bound to $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}_B(N^7)$. For curves of general dimension, we can also distinguish between ordinary and non-ordinary real singularities and determine their multiplicities in the same expected complexity of PTOPO by employing the algorithm of Blasco and P\'erez-D\'iaz [CAGD'19]. We have implemented PTOPO in Maple for the case of plane and space curves. Our experiments illustrate its practical nature.
We study algorithms for approximating pairwise similarity matrices that arise in natural language processing. Generally, computing a similarity matrix for $n$ data points requires $\Omega(n^2)$ similarity computations. This quadratic scaling is a significant bottleneck, especially when similarities are computed via expensive functions, e.g., via transformer models. Approximation methods reduce this quadratic complexity, often by using a small subset of exactly computed similarities to approximate the remainder of the complete pairwise similarity matrix. Significant work focuses on the efficient approximation of positive semidefinite (PSD) similarity matrices, which arise e.g., in kernel methods. However, much less is understood about indefinite (non-PSD) similarity matrices, which often arise in NLP. Motivated by the observation that many of these matrices are still somewhat close to PSD, we introduce a generalization of the popular Nystr\"{o}m method to the indefinite setting. Our algorithm can be applied to any similarity matrix and runs in sublinear time in the size of the matrix, producing a rank-$s$ approximation with just $O(ns)$ similarity computations. We show that our method, along with a simple variant of CUR decomposition, performs very well in approximating a variety of similarity matrices arising in NLP tasks. We demonstrate high accuracy of the approximated similarity matrices in the downstream tasks of document classification, sentence similarity, and cross-document coreference.
This paper focuses on the non-asymptotic concentration of the heteroskedastic Wishart-type matrices. Suppose $Z$ is a $p_1$-by-$p_2$ random matrix and $Z_{ij} \sim N(0,\sigma_{ij}^2)$ independently, we prove the expected spectral norm of Wishart matrix deviations (i.e., $\mathbb{E} \left\|ZZ^\top - \mathbb{E} ZZ^\top\right\|$) is upper bounded by \begin{equation*} \begin{split} (1+\epsilon)\left\{2\sigma_C\sigma_R + \sigma_C^2 + C\sigma_R\sigma_*\sqrt{\log(p_1 \wedge p_2)} + C\sigma_*^2\log(p_1 \wedge p_2)\right\}, \end{split} \end{equation*} where $\sigma_C^2 := \max_j \sum_{i=1}^{p_1}\sigma_{ij}^2$, $\sigma_R^2 := \max_i \sum_{j=1}^{p_2}\sigma_{ij}^2$ and $\sigma_*^2 := \max_{i,j}\sigma_{ij}^2$. A minimax lower bound is developed that matches this upper bound. Then, we derive the concentration inequalities, moments, and tail bounds for the heteroskedastic Wishart-type matrix under more general distributions, such as sub-Gaussian and heavy-tailed distributions. Next, we consider the cases where $Z$ has homoskedastic columns or rows (i.e., $\sigma_{ij} \approx \sigma_i$ or $\sigma_{ij} \approx \sigma_j$) and derive the rate-optimal Wishart-type concentration bounds. Finally, we apply the developed tools to identify the sharp signal-to-noise ratio threshold for consistent clustering in the heteroskedastic clustering problem.
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.