Coloring unit-disk graphs efficiently is an important problem in the global and distributed setting, with applications in radio channel assignment problems when the communication relies on omni-directional antennas of the same power. In this context it is important to bound not only the complexity of the coloring algorithms, but also the number of colors used. In this paper, we consider two natural distributed settings. In the location-aware setting (when nodes know their coordinates in the plane), we give a constant time distributed algorithm coloring any unit-disk graph $G$ with at most $(3+\epsilon)\omega(G)+6$ colors, for any constant $\epsilon>0$, where $\omega(G)$ is the clique number of $G$. This improves upon a classical 3-approximation algorithm for this problem, for all unit-disk graphs whose chromatic number significantly exceeds their clique number. When nodes do not know their coordinates in the plane, we give a distributed algorithm in the LOCAL model that colors every unit-disk graph $G$ with at most $5.68\omega(G)$ colors in (see \cref{sec:comput}) rounds. Moreover, when $\omega(G)=O(1)$, the algorithm runs in $O(\log^* n)$ rounds. This algorithm is based on a study of the local structure of unit-disk graphs, which is of independent interest. We conjecture that every unit-disk graph $G$ has average degree at most $4\omega(G)$, which would imply the existence of a $O(\log n)$ round algorithm coloring any unit-disk graph $G$ with (approximatively) $4\omega(G)$ colors.
Approximating the graph diameter is a basic task of both theoretical and practical interest. A simple folklore algorithm can output a 2-approximation to the diameter in linear time by running BFS from an arbitrary vertex. It has been open whether a better approximation is possible in near-linear time. A series of papers on fine-grained complexity have led to strong hardness results for diameter in directed graphs, culminating in a recent tradeoff curve independently discovered by [Li, STOC'21] and [Dalirrooyfard and Wein, STOC'21], showing that under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH), for any integer $k\ge 2$ and $\delta>0$, a $2-\frac{1}{k}-\delta$ approximation for diameter in directed $m$-edge graphs requires $mn^{1+1/(k-1)-o(1)}$ time. In particular, the simple linear time $2$-approximation algorithm is optimal for directed graphs. In this paper we prove that the same tradeoff lower bound curve is possible for undirected graphs as well, extending results of [Roditty and Vassilevska W., STOC'13], [Li'20] and [Bonnet, ICALP'21] who proved the first few cases of the curve, $k=2,3$ and $4$, respectively. Our result shows in particular that the simple linear time $2$-approximation algorithm is also optimal for undirected graphs. To obtain our result we develop new tools for fine-grained reductions that could be useful for proving SETH-based hardness for other problems in undirected graphs related to distance computation.
Majority-SAT is the problem of determining whether an input $n$-variable formula in conjunctive normal form (CNF) has at least $2^{n-1}$ satisfying assignments. Majority-SAT and related problems have been studied extensively in various AI communities interested in the complexity of probabilistic planning and inference. Although Majority-SAT has been known to be PP-complete for over 40 years, the complexity of a natural variant has remained open: Majority-$k$SAT, where the input CNF formula is restricted to have clause width at most $k$. We prove that for every $k$, Majority-$k$SAT is in P. In fact, for any positive integer $k$ and rational $\rho \in (0,1)$ with bounded denominator, we give an algorithm that can determine whether a given $k$-CNF has at least $\rho \cdot 2^n$ satisfying assignments, in deterministic linear time (whereas the previous best-known algorithm ran in exponential time). Our algorithms have interesting positive implications for counting complexity and the complexity of inference, significantly reducing the known complexities of related problems such as E-MAJ-$k$SAT and MAJ-MAJ-$k$SAT. At the heart of our approach is an efficient method for solving threshold counting problems by extracting sunflowers found in the corresponding set system of a $k$-CNF. We also show that the tractability of Majority-$k$SAT is somewhat fragile. For the closely related GtMajority-SAT problem (where we ask whether a given formula has greater than $2^{n-1}$ satisfying assignments) which is known to be PP-complete, we show that GtMajority-$k$SAT is in P for $k\le 3$, but becomes NP-complete for $k\geq 4$. These results are counterintuitive, because the ``natural'' classifications of these problems would have been PP-completeness, and because there is a stark difference in the complexity of GtMajority-$k$SAT and Majority-$k$SAT for all $k\ge 4$.
We consider random matrix ensembles on the Hermitian matrices that are heavy tailed, in particular not all moments exist, and that are invariant under the conjugate action of the unitary group. The latter property entails that the eigenvectors are Haar distributed and, therefore, factorise from the eigenvalue statistics. We prove a classification for stable matrix ensembles of this kind of matrices represented in terms of matrices, their eigenvalues and their diagonal entries with the help of the classification of the multivariate stable distributions and the harmonic analysis on symmetric matrix spaces. Moreover, we identify sufficient and necessary conditions for their domains of attraction. To illustrate our findings we discuss for instance elliptical invariant random matrix ensembles and P\'olya ensembles. As a byproduct we generalise the derivative principle on the Hermitian matrices to general tempered distributions.
We consider the rooted prize-collecting walks (PCW) problem, wherein we seek a collection $C$ of rooted walks having minimum prize-collecting cost, which is the (total cost of walks in $C$) + (total node-reward of nodes not visited by any walk in $C$). This problem arises naturally as the Lagrangian relaxation of both orienteering, where we seek a length-bounded walk of maximum reward, and the $\ell$-stroll problem, where we seek a minimum-length walk covering at least $\ell$ nodes. Our main contribution is to devise a simple, combinatorial algorithm for the PCW problem in directed graphs that returns a rooted tree whose prize-collecting cost is at most the optimum value of the prize-collecting walks problem. We utilize our algorithm to develop combinatorial approximation algorithms for two fundamental vehicle-routing problems (VRPs): (1) orienteering; and (2) $k$-minimum-latency problem ($k$-MLP), wherein we seek to cover all nodes using $k$ paths starting at a prescribed root node, so as to minimize the sum of the node visiting times. Our combinatorial algorithm allows us to sidestep the part where we solve a preflow-based LP in the LP-rounding algorithms of Friggstand and Swamy (2017) for orienteering, and in the state-of-the-art $7.183$-approximation algorithm for $k$-MP in Post and Swamy (2015). Consequently, we obtain combinatorial implementations of these algorithms with substantially improved running times compared with the current-best approximation factors. We report computational results for our resulting (combinatorial implementations of) orienteering algorithms, which show that the algorithms perform quite well in practice, both in terms of the quality of the solution they return, as also the upper bound they yield on the orienteering optimum (which is obtained by leveraging the workings of our PCW algorithm).
We consider the problem of secure distributed matrix computation (SDMC), where a \textit{user} queries a function of data matrices generated at distributed \textit{source} nodes. We assume the availability of $N$ honest but curious computation servers, which are connected to the sources, the user, and each other through orthogonal and reliable communication links. Our goal is to minimize the amount of data that must be transmitted from the sources to the servers, called the \textit{upload cost}, while guaranteeing that no $T$ colluding servers can learn any information about the source matrices, and the user cannot learn any information beyond the computation result. We first focus on secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM), considering two matrices, and propose a novel polynomial coding scheme using the properties of finite field discrete Fourier transform, which achieves an upload cost significantly lower than the existing results in the literature. We then generalize the proposed scheme to include straggler mitigation, and to the multiplication of multiple matrices while keeping the input matrices, the intermediate computation results, as well as the final result secure against any $T$ colluding servers. We also consider a special case, called computation with own data, where the data matrices used for computation belong to the user. In this case, we drop the security requirement against the user, and show that the proposed scheme achieves the minimal upload cost. We then propose methods for performing other common matrix computations securely on distributed servers, including changing the parameters of secret sharing, matrix transpose, matrix exponentiation, solving a linear system, and matrix inversion, which are then used to show how arbitrary matrix polynomials can be computed securely on distributed servers using the proposed procedure.
We study sparse linear regression over a network of agents, modeled as an undirected graph (with no centralized node). The estimation problem is formulated as the minimization of the sum of the local LASSO loss functions plus a quadratic penalty of the consensus constraint -- the latter being instrumental to obtain distributed solution methods. While penalty-based consensus methods have been extensively studied in the optimization literature, their statistical and computational guarantees in the high dimensional setting remain unclear. This work provides an answer to this open problem. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we establish statistical consistency of the estimator: under a suitable choice of the penalty parameter, the optimal solution of the penalized problem achieves near optimal minimax rate $\mathcal{O}(s \log d/N)$ in $\ell_2$-loss, where $s$ is the sparsity value, $d$ is the ambient dimension, and $N$ is the total sample size in the network -- this matches centralized sample rates. Second, we show that the proximal-gradient algorithm applied to the penalized problem, which naturally leads to distributed implementations, converges linearly up to a tolerance of the order of the centralized statistical error -- the rate scales as $\mathcal{O}(d)$, revealing an unavoidable speed-accuracy dilemma.Numerical results demonstrate the tightness of the derived sample rate and convergence rate scalings.
We present the Sequential Aggregation and Rematerialization (SAR) scheme for distributed full-batch training of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on large graphs. Large-scale training of GNNs has recently been dominated by sampling-based methods and methods based on non-learnable message passing. SAR on the other hand is a distributed technique that can train any GNN type directly on an entire large graph. The key innovation in SAR is the distributed sequential rematerialization scheme which sequentially re-constructs then frees pieces of the prohibitively large GNN computational graph during the backward pass. This results in excellent memory scaling behavior where the memory consumption per worker goes down linearly with the number of workers, even for densely connected graphs. Using SAR, we report the largest applications of full-batch GNN training to-date, and demonstrate large memory savings as the number of workers increases. We also present a general technique based on kernel fusion and attention-matrix rematerialization to optimize both the runtime and memory efficiency of attention-based models. We show that, coupled with SAR, our optimized attention kernels lead to significant speedups and memory savings in attention-based GNNs.
We prove several new tight distributed lower bounds for classic symmetry breaking graph problems. As a basic tool, we first provide a new insightful proof that any deterministic distributed algorithm that computes a $\Delta$-coloring on $\Delta$-regular trees requires $\Omega(\log_\Delta n)$ rounds and any randomized algorithm requires $\Omega(\log_\Delta\log n)$ rounds. We prove this result by showing that a natural relaxation of the $\Delta$-coloring problem is a fixed point in the round elimination framework. As a first application, we show that our $\Delta$-coloring lower bound proof directly extends to arbdefective colorings. We exactly characterize which variants of the arbdefective coloring problem are "easy", and which of them instead are "hard". As a second application, which we see as our main contribution, we use the structure of the fixed point as a building block to prove lower bounds as a function of $\Delta$ for a large class of distributed symmetry breaking problems. For example, we obtain a tight lower bound for the fundamental problem of computing a $(2,\beta)$-ruling set. This is an exponential improvement over the best existing lower bound for the problem, which was proven in [FOCS '20]. Our lower bound even applies to a much more general family of problems that allows for almost arbitrary combinations of natural constraints from coloring problems, orientation problems, and independent set problems, and provides a single unified proof for known and new lower bound results for these types of problems. Our lower bounds as a function of $\Delta$ also imply lower bounds as a function of $n$. We obtain, for example, that maximal independent set, on trees, requires $\Omega(\log n / \log \log n)$ rounds for deterministic algorithms, which is tight.
Graph neural networks (GNNs) are a popular class of machine learning models whose major advantage is their ability to incorporate a sparse and discrete dependency structure between data points. Unfortunately, GNNs can only be used when such a graph-structure is available. In practice, however, real-world graphs are often noisy and incomplete or might not be available at all. With this work, we propose to jointly learn the graph structure and the parameters of graph convolutional networks (GCNs) by approximately solving a bilevel program that learns a discrete probability distribution on the edges of the graph. This allows one to apply GCNs not only in scenarios where the given graph is incomplete or corrupted but also in those where a graph is not available. We conduct a series of experiments that analyze the behavior of the proposed method and demonstrate that it outperforms related methods by a significant margin.
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.