The sensitivity of a string compression algorithm $C$ asks how much the output size $C(T)$ for an input string $T$ can increase when a single character edit operation is performed on $T$. This notion enables one to measure the robustness of compression algorithms in terms of errors and/or dynamic changes occurring in the input string. In this paper, we analyze the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity of string compression algorithms, defined by $\max_{T \in \Sigma^n}\{C(T')/C(T) : ed(T, T') = 1\}$, where $ed(T, T')$ denotes the edit distance between $T$ and $T'$. For the most common versions of the Lempel-Ziv 77 compressors, we prove that the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity is only a small constant (2 or 3, depending on the version of the Lempel-Ziv 77 and the edit operation type). We strengthen our upper bound results by presenting matching lower bounds on the worst-case sensitivity for all these major versions of the Lempel-Ziv 77 factorizations. This contrasts with the previously known related results such that the size $z_{\rm 78}$ of the Lempel-Ziv 78 factorization can increase by a factor of $\Omega(n^{1/4})$ [Lagarde and Perifel, 2018], and the number $r$ of runs in the Burrows-Wheeler transform can increase by a factor of $\Omega(\log n)$ [Giuliani et al., 2021] when a character is prepended to an input string of length $n$. We also study the worst-case sensitivity of several grammar compression algorithms including Bisection, AVL-grammar, GCIS, and CDAWG. Further, we extend the notion of the worst-case sensitivity to string repetitiveness measures such as the smallest string attractor size $\gamma$ and the substring complexity $\delta$. We present some non-trivial upper and lower bounds of the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity for $\gamma$ and matching upper and lower bounds of the worst-case multiplicative sensitivity for $\delta$.
The problem of scheduling unrelated machines has been studied since the inception of algorithmic mechanism design \cite{NR99}. It is a resource allocation problem that entails assigning $m$ tasks to $n$ machines for execution. Machines are regarded as strategic agents who may lie about their execution costs so as to minimize their allocated workload. To address the situation when monetary payment is not an option to compensate the machines' costs, \citeauthor{DBLP:journals/mst/Koutsoupias14} [2014] devised two \textit{truthful} mechanisms, K and P respectively, that achieve an approximation ratio of $\frac{n+1}{2}$ and $n$, for social cost minimization. In addition, no truthful mechanism can achieve an approximation ratio better than $\frac{n+1}{2}$. Hence, mechanism K is optimal. While approximation ratio provides a strong worst-case guarantee, it also limits us to a comprehensive understanding of mechanism performance on various inputs. This paper investigates these two scheduling mechanisms beyond the worst case. We first show that mechanism K achieves a smaller social cost than mechanism P on every input. That is, mechanism K is pointwise better than mechanism P. Next, for each task $j$, when machines' execution costs $t_i^j$ are independent and identically drawn from a task-specific distribution $F^j(t)$, we show that the average-case approximation ratio of mechanism K converges to a constant. This bound is tight for mechanism K. For a better understanding of this distribution dependent constant, on the one hand, we estimate its value by plugging in a few common distributions; on the other, we show that this converging bound improves a known bound \cite{DBLP:conf/aaai/Zhang18} which only captures the single-task setting. Last, we find that the average-case approximation ratio of mechanism P converges to the same constant.
Minimum cut/maximum flow (min-cut/max-flow) algorithms solve a variety of problems in computer vision and thus significant effort has been put into developing fast min-cut/max-flow algorithms. As a result, it is difficult to choose an ideal algorithm for a given problem. Furthermore, parallel algorithms have not been thoroughly compared. In this paper, we evaluate the state-of-the-art serial and parallel min-cut/max-flow algorithms on the largest set of computer vision problems yet. We focus on generic algorithms, i.e., for unstructured graphs, but also compare with the specialized GridCut implementation. When applicable, GridCut performs best. Otherwise, the two pseudoflow algorithms, Hochbaum pseudoflow and excesses incremental breadth first search, achieves the overall best performance. The most memory efficient implementation tested is the Boykov-Kolmogorov algorithm. Amongst generic parallel algorithms, we find the bottom-up merging approach by Liu and Sun to be best, but no method is dominant. Of the generic parallel methods, only the parallel preflow push-relabel algorithm is able to efficiently scale with many processors across problem sizes, and no generic parallel method consistently outperforms serial algorithms. Finally, we provide and evaluate strategies for algorithm selection to obtain good expected performance. We make our dataset and implementations publicly available for further research.
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.
Given two strings $T$ and $S$ and a set of strings $P$, for each string $p \in P$, consider the unique substrings of $T$ that have $p$ as their prefix and $S$ as their suffix. Two problems then come to mind; the first problem being the counting of such substrings, and the second problem being the problem of listing all such substrings. In this paper, we describe linear-time, linear-space suffix tree-based algorithms for both problems. More specifically, we describe an $O(|T| + |P|)$ time algorithm for the counting problem, and an $O(|T| + |P| + \#(ans))$ time algorithm for the listing problem, where $\#(ans)$ refers to the number of strings being listed in total, and $|P|$ refers to the total length of the strings in $P$. We also consider the reversed version of the problems, where one prefix condition string and multiple suffix condition strings are given instead, and similarly describe linear-time, linear-space algorithms to solve them.
SVD (singular value decomposition) is one of the basic tools of machine learning, allowing to optimize basis for a given matrix. However, sometimes we have a set of matrices $\{A_k\}_k$ instead, and would like to optimize a single common basis for them: find orthogonal matrices $U$, $V$, such that $\{U^T A_k V\}$ set of matrices is somehow simpler. For example DCT-II is orthonormal basis of functions commonly used in image/video compression - as discussed here, this kind of basis can be quickly automatically optimized for a given dataset. While also discussed gradient descent optimization might be computationally costly, there is proposed CSVD (common SVD): fast general approach based on SVD. Specifically, we choose $U$ as built of eigenvectors of $\sum_i (w_k)^q (A_k A_k^T)^p$ and $V$ of $\sum_k (w_k)^q (A_k^T A_k)^p$, where $w_k$ are their weights, $p,q>0$ are some chosen powers e.g. 1/2, optionally with normalization e.g. $A \to A - rc^T$ where $r_i=\sum_j A_{ij}, c_j =\sum_i A_{ij}$.
A palindromic substring $T[i.. j]$ of a string $T$ is said to be a shortest unique palindromic substring (SUPS) in $T$ for an interval $[p, q]$ if $T[i.. j]$ is a shortest one such that $T[i.. j]$ occurs only once in $T$, and $[i, j]$ contains $[p, q]$. The SUPS problem is, given a string $T$ of length $n$, to construct a data structure that can compute all the SUPSs for any given query interval. It is known that any SUPS query can be answered in $O(\alpha)$ time after $O(n)$-time preprocessing, where $\alpha$ is the number of SUPSs to output [Inoue et al., 2018]. In this paper, we first show that $\alpha$ is at most $4$, and the upper bound is tight. Also, we present an algorithm to solve the SUPS problem for a sliding window that can answer any query in $O(\log\log W)$ time and update data structures in amortized $O(\log\sigma)$ time, where $W$ is the size of the window, and $\sigma$ is the alphabet size. Furthermore, we consider the SUPS problem in the after-edit model and present an efficient algorithm. Namely, we present an algorithm that uses $O(n)$ time for preprocessing and answers any $k$ SUPS queries in $O(\log n\log\log n + k\log\log n)$ time after single character substitution. As a by-product, we propose a fully-dynamic data structure for range minimum queries (RmQs) with a constraint where the width of each query range is limited to polylogarithmic. The constrained RmQ data structure can answer such a query in constant time and support a single-element edit operation in amortized constant time.
Grammar-based compression is a loss-less data compression scheme that represents a given string $w$ by a context-free grammar that generates only $w$. While computing the smallest grammar which generates a given string $w$ is NP-hard in general, a number of polynomial-time grammar-based compressors which work well in practice have been proposed. RePair, proposed by Larsson and Moffat in 1999, is a grammar-based compressor which recursively replaces all possible occurrences of a most frequently occurring bigrams in the string. Since there can be multiple choices of the most frequent bigrams to replace, different implementations of RePair can result in different grammars. In this paper, we show that the smallest grammars generating the Fibonacci words $F_k$ can be completely characterized by RePair, where $F_k$ denotes the $k$-th Fibonacci word. Namely, all grammars for $F_k$ generated by any implementation of RePair are the smallest grammars for $F_k$, and no other grammars can be the smallest for $F_k$. To the best of our knowledge, Fibonacci words are the first non-trivial infinite family of strings for which RePair is optimal.
There are many important high dimensional function classes that have fast agnostic learning algorithms when strong assumptions on the distribution of examples can be made, such as Gaussianity or uniformity over the domain. But how can one be sufficiently confident that the data indeed satisfies the distributional assumption, so that one can trust in the output quality of the agnostic learning algorithm? We propose a model by which to systematically study the design of tester-learner pairs $(\mathcal{A},\mathcal{T})$, such that if the distribution on examples in the data passes the tester $\mathcal{T}$ then one can safely trust the output of the agnostic learner $\mathcal{A}$ on the data. To demonstrate the power of the model, we apply it to the classical problem of agnostically learning halfspaces under the standard Gaussian distribution and present a tester-learner pair with a combined run-time of $n^{\tilde{O}(1/\epsilon^4)}$. This qualitatively matches that of the best known ordinary agnostic learning algorithms for this task. In contrast, finite sample Gaussian distribution testers do not exist for the $L_1$ and EMD distance measures. A key step in the analysis is a novel characterization of concentration and anti-concentration properties of a distribution whose low-degree moments approximately match those of a Gaussian. We also use tools from polynomial approximation theory. In contrast, we show strong lower bounds on the combined run-times of tester-learner pairs for the problems of agnostically learning convex sets under the Gaussian distribution and for monotone Boolean functions under the uniform distribution over $\{0,1\}^n$. Through these lower bounds we exhibit natural problems where there is a dramatic gap between standard agnostic learning run-time and the run-time of the best tester-learner pair.
We recall some of the history of the information-theoretic approach to deriving core results in probability theory and indicate parts of the recent resurgence of interest in this area with current progress along several interesting directions. Then we give a new information-theoretic proof of a finite version of de Finetti's classical representation theorem for finite-valued random variables. We derive an upper bound on the relative entropy between the distribution of the first $k$ in a sequence of $n$ exchangeable random variables, and an appropriate mixture over product distributions. The mixing measure is characterised as the law of the empirical measure of the original sequence, and de Finetti's result is recovered as a corollary. The proof is nicely motivated by the Gibbs conditioning principle in connection with statistical mechanics, and it follows along an appealing sequence of steps. The technical estimates required for these steps are obtained via the use of a collection of combinatorial tools known within information theory as `the method of types.'
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.