We study the problem of computing the vitality with respect to max flow of edges and vertices in undirected planar graphs, where the vitality of an edge/vertex in a graph with respect to max flow between two fixed vertices $s,t$ is defined as the max flow decrease when the edge/vertex is removed from the graph. We show that the vitality of any $k$ selected edges can be computed in $O(kn + n\log\log n)$ worst-case time, and that a $\delta$ additive approximation of the vitality of all edges with capacity at most $c$ can be computed in $O(\frac{c}{\delta}n +n \log \log n)$ worst-case time, where $n$ is the size of the graph. Similar results are given for the vitality of vertices. All our algorithms work in $O(n)$ space.
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.
A partial orientation $\vec{H}$ of a graph $G$ is a weak $r$-guidance system if for any two vertices at distance at most $r$ in $G$, there exists a shortest path $P$ between them such that $\vec{H}$ directs all but one edge in $P$ towards this edge. In case $\vec{H}$ has bounded maximum outdegree, this gives an efficient representation of shortest paths of length at most $r$ in $G$. We show that graphs from many natural graph classes admit such weak guidance systems, and study the algorithmic aspects of this notion.
We give a fast algorithm for sampling uniform solutions of general constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in a local lemma regime. The expected running time of our algorithm is near-linear in $n$ and a fixed polynomial in $\Delta$, where $n$ is the number of variables and $\Delta$ is the max degree of constraints. Previously, up to similar conditions, sampling algorithms with running time polynomial in both $n$ and $\Delta$, only existed for the almost atomic case, where each constraint is violated by a small number of forbidden local configurations. Our sampling approach departs from all previous fast algorithms for sampling LLL, which were based on Markov chains. A crucial step of our algorithm is a recursive marginal sampler that is of independent interests. Within a local lemma regime, this marginal sampler can draw a random value for a variable according to its marginal distribution, at a local cost independent of the size of the CSP.
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.
Computing a maximum independent set (MaxIS) is a fundamental NP-hard problem in graph theory, which has important applications in a wide spectrum of fields. Since graphs in many applications are changing frequently over time, the problem of maintaining a MaxIS over dynamic graphs has attracted increasing attention over the past few years. Due to the intractability of maintaining an exact MaxIS, this paper aims to develop efficient algorithms that can maintain an approximate MaxIS with an accuracy guarantee theoretically. In particular, we propose a framework that maintains a $(\frac{\Delta}{2} + 1)$-approximate MaxIS over dynamic graphs and prove that it achieves a constant approximation ratio in many real-world networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first non-trivial approximability result for the dynamic MaxIS problem. Following the framework, we implement an efficient linear-time dynamic algorithm and a more effective dynamic algorithm with near-linear expected time complexity. Our thorough experiments over real and synthetic graphs demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms, especially when the graph is highly dynamic.
In this short note, we show that for any $\epsilon >0$ and $k<n^{0.5-\epsilon}$ the choice number of the Kneser graph $KG_{n,k}$ is $\Theta (n\log n)$.
We study the notion of local treewidth in sparse random graphs: the maximum treewidth over all $k$-vertex subgraphs of an $n$-vertex graph. When $k$ is not too large, we give nearly tight bounds for this local treewidth parameter; we also derive tight bounds for the local treewidth of noisy trees, trees where every non-edge is added independently with small probability. We apply our upper bounds on the local treewidth to obtain fixed parameter tractable algorithms (on random graphs and noisy trees) for edge-removal problems centered around containing a contagious process evolving over a network. In these problems, our main parameter of study is $k$, the number of "infected" vertices in the network. For a certain range of parameters the running time of our algorithms on $n$-vertex graphs is $2^{o(k)}\textrm{poly}(n)$, improving upon the $2^{\Omega(k)}\textrm{poly}(n)$ performance of the best-known algorithms designed for worst-case instances of these edge deletion problems.
This extensive revision of my paper "Description of an $O(\text{poly}(n))$ Algorithm for NP-Complete Combinatorial Problems" will dramatically simplify the content of the original paper by solving subset-sum instead of $3$-SAT. I will first define the "product-derivative" method which will be used to generate a system of equations for solving unknown polynomial coefficients. Then I will describe the "Dragonfly" algorithm usable to solve subset-sum in $O(n^{16}\log(n))$ which is itself composed of a set of symbolic algebra steps on monic polynomials to convert a subset, $S_T$, of a set of positive integers, $S$, with a given target sum, $T$ into a polynomial with roots corresponding to the elements of $S_T$.
Given a set of well-formed terminal pairs on the external face of an undirected planar graph with unit edge weights, we give a linear-time algorithm for computing the union of non-crossing shortest paths joining each terminal pair, where well-formed means that such a set of non-crossing paths exists. This allows us to compute distances between each terminal pair, within the same time bound. We also give a novel concept of incremental shortest path subgraph of a planar graph, i.e., a partition of the planar embedding in subregions that preserve distances, that can be of interest itself.