A knot $K$ in a directed graph $D$ is a strongly connected component of size at least two such that there is no arc $(u,v)$ with $u \in V(K)$ and $v\notin V(K)$. Given a directed graph $D=(V,E)$, we study Knot-Free Vertex Deletion (KFVD), where the goal is to remove the minimum number of vertices such that the resulting graph contains no knots. This problem naturally emerges from its application in deadlock resolution since knots are deadlocks in the OR-model of distributed computation. The fastest known exact algorithm in literature for KFVD runs in time $\mathcal{O}^\star(1.576^n)$. In this paper, we present an improved exact algorithm running in time $\mathcal{O}^\star(1.4549^n)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices in $D$. We also prove that the number of inclusion wise minimal knot-free vertex deletion sets is $\mathcal{O}^\star(1.4549^n)$ and construct a family of graphs with $\Omega(1.4422^n)$ minimal knot-free vertex deletion sets
Near-term quantum computers are expected to work in an environment where each operation is noisy, with no error correction. Therefore, quantum-circuit optimizers are applied to minimize the number of noisy operations. Today, physicists are constantly experimenting with novel devices and architectures. For every new physical substrate and for every modification of a quantum computer, we need to modify or rewrite major pieces of the optimizer to run successful experiments. In this paper, we present QUESO, an efficient approach for automatically synthesizing a quantum-circuit optimizer for a given quantum device. For instance, in 1.2 minutes, QUESO can synthesize an optimizer with high-probability correctness guarantees for IBM computers that significantly outperforms leading compilers, such as IBM's Qiskit and TKET, on the majority (85%) of the circuits in a diverse benchmark suite. A number of theoretical and algorithmic insights underlie QUESO: (1) An algebraic approach for representing rewrite rules and their semantics. This facilitates reasoning about complex symbolic rewrite rules that are beyond the scope of existing techniques. (2) A fast approach for probabilistically verifying equivalence of quantum circuits by reducing the problem to a special form of polynomial identity testing. (3) A novel probabilistic data structure, called a polynomial identity filter (PIF), for efficiently synthesizing rewrite rules. (4) A beam-search-based algorithm that efficiently applies the synthesized symbolic rewrite rules to optimize quantum circuits.
Polynomial based approaches, such as the Mat-Dot and entangled polynomial codes (EPC) have been used extensively within coded matrix computations to obtain schemes with good recovery thresholds. However, these schemes are well-recognized to suffer from poor numerical stability in decoding. Moreover, the encoding process in these schemes involves linearly combining a large number of input submatrices, i.e., the encoding weight is high. For the practically relevant case of sparse input matrices, this can have the undesirable effect of significantly increasing the worker node computation time. In this work, we propose a generalization of the EPC scheme by combining the idea of gradient coding along with the basic EPC encoding. Our technique allows us to reduce the weight of the encoding and arrive at schemes that exhibit much better numerical stability; this is achieved at the expense of a worse threshold. By appropriately setting parameters in our scheme, we recover several well-known schemes in the literature. Simulation results show that our scheme provides excellent numerical stability and fast computation speed (for sparse input matrices) as compared to EPC and Mat-Dot codes.
We study best arm identification in a variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the learner has limited precision in arm selection. The learner can only sample arms via certain exploration bundles, which we refer to as boxes. In particular, at each sampling epoch, the learner selects a box, which in turn causes an arm to get pulled as per a box-specific probability distribution. The pulled arm and its instantaneous reward are revealed to the learner, whose goal is to find the best arm by minimising the expected stopping time, subject to an upper bound on the error probability. We present an asymptotic lower bound on the expected stopping time, which holds as the error probability vanishes. We show that the optimal allocation suggested by the lower bound is, in general, non-unique and therefore challenging to track. We propose a modified tracking-based algorithm to handle non-unique optimal allocations, and demonstrate that it is asymptotically optimal. We also present non-asymptotic lower and upper bounds on the stopping time in the simpler setting when the arms accessible from one box do not overlap with those of others.
We study fair division of indivisible chores among $n$ agents with additive disutility functions. Two well-studied fairness notions for indivisible items are envy-freeness up to one/any item (EF1/EFX) and the standard notion of economic efficiency is Pareto optimality (PO). There is a noticeable gap between the results known for both EF1 and EFX in the goods and chores settings. The case of chores turns out to be much more challenging. We reduce this gap by providing slightly relaxed versions of the known results on goods for the chores setting. Interestingly, our algorithms run in polynomial time, unlike their analogous versions in the goods setting. We introduce the concept of $k$ surplus which means that up to $k$ more chores are allocated to the agents and each of them is a copy of an original chore. We present a polynomial-time algorithm which gives EF1 and PO allocations with $(n-1)$ surplus. We relax the notion of EFX slightly and define tEFX which requires that the envy from agent $i$ to agent $j$ is removed upon the transfer of any chore from the $i$'s bundle to $j$'s bundle. We give a polynomial-time algorithm that in the chores case for $3$ agents returns an allocation which is either proportional or tEFX. Note that proportionality is a very strong criterion in the case of indivisible items, and hence both notions we guarantee are desirable.
The problem of reconstructing a sequence from the set of its length-$k$ substrings has received considerable attention due to its various applications in genomics. We study an uncoded version of this problem where multiple random sources are to be simultaneously reconstructed from the union of their $k$-mer sets. We consider an asymptotic regime where $m = n^\alpha$ i.i.d. source sequences of length $n$ are to be reconstructed from the set of their substrings of length $k=\beta \log n$, and seek to characterize the $(\alpha,\beta)$ pairs for which reconstruction is information-theoretically feasible. We show that, as $n \to \infty$, the source sequences can be reconstructed if $\beta > \max(2\alpha+1,\alpha+2)$ and cannot be reconstructed if $\beta < \max( 2\alpha+1, \alpha+ \tfrac32)$, characterizing the feasibility region almost completely. Interestingly, our result shows that there are feasible $(\alpha,\beta)$ pairs where repeats across the source strings abound, and non-trivial reconstruction algorithms are needed to achieve the fundamental limit.
Minimum flow decomposition (MFD) is the NP-hard problem of finding a smallest decomposition of a network flow/circulation $X$ on a directed graph $G$ into weighted source-to-sink paths whose superposition equals $X$. We show that, for acyclic graphs, considering the \emph{width} of the graph (the minimum number of paths needed to cover all of its edges) yields advances in our understanding of its approximability. For the version of the problem that uses only non-negative weights, we identify and characterise a new class of \emph{width-stable} graphs, for which a popular heuristic is a \gwsimple-approximation ($|X|$ being the total flow of $X$), and strengthen its worst-case approximation ratio from $\Omega(\sqrt{m})$ to $\Omega(m / \log m)$ for sparse graphs, where $m$ is the number of edges in the graph. We also study a new problem on graphs with cycles, Minimum Cost Circulation Decomposition (MCCD), and show that it generalises MFD through a simple reduction. For the version allowing also negative weights, we give a $(\lceil \log \Vert X \Vert \rceil +1)$-approximation ($\Vert X \Vert$ being the maximum absolute value of $X$ on any edge) using a power-of-two approach, combined with parity fixing arguments and a decomposition of unitary circulations ($\Vert X \Vert \leq 1$), using a generalised notion of width for this problem. Finally, we disprove a conjecture about the linear independence of minimum (non-negative) flow decompositions posed by Kloster et al. [ALENEX 2018], but show that its useful implication (polynomial-time assignments of weights to a given set of paths to decompose a flow) holds for the negative version.
We give a short argument that yields a new lower bound on the number of subsampled rows from a bounded, orthonormal matrix necessary to form a matrix with the restricted isometry property. We show that a matrix formed by uniformly subsampling rows of an $N \times N$ Walsh matrix contains a $K$-sparse vector in the kernel, unless the number of subsampled rows is $\Omega(K \log K \log (N/K))$ -- our lower bound applies whenever $\min(K, N/K) > \log^C N$. Containing a sparse vector in the kernel precludes not only the restricted isometry property, but more generally the application of those matrices for uniform sparse recovery.
We provide an algorithm for the minimum 2-vertex-connected spanning subgraph problem with approximation ratio $\frac{4}{3}$, improving upon the previous best factor $\frac{10}{7}$.
A promising approach for obtaining improved approximation algorithms for Steiner tree is to use the bidirected cut relaxation (BCR). The integrality gap of this relaxation is at least $36/31$, and it has long been conjectured that its true value is very close to this lower bound. However, the best upper bound for general graphs was an almost trivial $2$. We improve this bound to $3/2$ by a fast combinatorial algorithm based on the primal-dual schema.
The trade algorithm, which includes the curveball and fastball implementations, is the state-of-the-art for uniformly sampling r x c binary matrices with fixed row and column sums. The mixing time of the trade algorithm is currently unknown, although 5r is currently used as a heuristic. We propose a distribution-based approach to estimating the mixing time, but which also can return a sample of matrices that are nearly guaranteed to be uniformly randomly sampled. In numerical experiments on matrices that vary by size, fill, and row and column sum distributions, we find that the upper bound on mixing time is at least 10r, and that it increases as a function of both c and the fraction of cells containing a 1.