We consider the L(p,q)-Edge-Labelling problem, which is the edge variant of the well-known L(p,q)-Labelling problem. So far, the complexity of this problem was only partially classified. We complete this study for all nonnegative p and q, by showing that, whenever (p,q) is not (0,0), L(p,q)-Edge-Labelling problem is NP-complete. We do this by proving that for all nonnegative p and q, except p=q=0, there exists an integer k so that L(p,q)-Edge-k-Labelling is NP-complete.
We study the performance of Markov chains for the $q$-state ferromagnetic Potts model on random regular graphs. It is conjectured that their performance is dictated by metastability phenomena, i.e., the presence of "phases" (clusters) in the sample space where Markov chains with local update rules, such as the Glauber dynamics, are bound to take exponential time to escape, and therefore cause slow mixing. The phases that are believed to drive these metastability phenomena in the case of the Potts model emerge as local, rather than global, maxima of the so-called Bethe functional, and previous approaches of analysing these phases based on optimisation arguments fall short of the task. Our first contribution is to detail the emergence of the metastable phases for the $q$-state Potts model on the $d$-regular random graph for all integers $q,d\geq 3$, and establish that for an interval of temperatures, delineated by the uniqueness and the Kesten-Stigum thresholds on the $d$-regular tree, the two phases coexist. The proofs are based on a conceptual connection between spatial properties and the structure of the Potts distribution on the random regular graph, rather than complicated moment calculations. Based on this new structural understanding of the model, we obtain various algorithmic consequences. We first complement recent fast mixing results for Glauber dynamics by Blanca and Gheissari below the uniqueness threshold, showing an exponential lower bound on the mixing time above the uniqueness threshold. Then, we obtain tight results even for the non-local Swendsen-Wang chain, where we establish slow mixing/metastability for the whole interval of temperatures where the chain is conjectured to mix slowly on the random regular graph. The key is to bound the conductance of the chains using a random graph "planting" argument combined with delicate bounds on random-graph percolation.
We consider classes of objective functions of cardinality constrained maximization problems for which the greedy algorithm guarantees a constant approximation. We propose the new class of $\gamma$-$\alpha$-augmentable functions and prove that it encompasses several important subclasses, such as functions of bounded submodularity ratio, $\alpha$-augmentable functions, and weighted rank functions of an independence system of bounded rank quotient - as well as additional objective functions for which the greedy algorithm yields an approximation. For this general class of functions, we show a tight bound of $\frac{\alpha}{\gamma}\cdot\frac{\mathrm{e}^\alpha}{\mathrm{e}^\alpha-1}$ on the approximation ratio of the greedy algorithm that tightly interpolates between bounds from the literature for functions of bounded submodularity ratio and for $\alpha$-augmentable functions. In paritcular, as a by-product, we close a gap left in [Math.Prog., 2020] by obtaining a tight lower bound for $\alpha$-augmentable functions for all $\alpha\geq1$. For weighted rank functions of independence systems, our tight bound becomes $\frac{\alpha}{\gamma}$, which recovers the known bound of $1/q$ for independence systems of rank quotient at least $q$.
Reinforcement learning with function approximation has recently achieved tremendous results in applications with large state spaces. This empirical success has motivated a growing body of theoretical work proposing necessary and sufficient conditions under which efficient reinforcement learning is possible. From this line of work, a remarkably simple minimal sufficient condition has emerged for sample efficient reinforcement learning: MDPs with optimal value function $V^*$ and $Q^*$ linear in some known low-dimensional features. In this setting, recent works have designed sample efficient algorithms which require a number of samples polynomial in the feature dimension and independent of the size of state space. They however leave finding computationally efficient algorithms as future work and this is considered a major open problem in the community. In this work, we make progress on this open problem by presenting the first computational lower bound for RL with linear function approximation: unless NP=RP, no randomized polynomial time algorithm exists for deterministic transition MDPs with a constant number of actions and linear optimal value functions. To prove this, we show a reduction from Unique-Sat, where we convert a CNF formula into an MDP with deterministic transitions, constant number of actions and low dimensional linear optimal value functions. This result also exhibits the first computational-statistical gap in reinforcement learning with linear function approximation, as the underlying statistical problem is information-theoretically solvable with a polynomial number of queries, but no computationally efficient algorithm exists unless NP=RP. Finally, we also prove a quasi-polynomial time lower bound under the Randomized Exponential Time Hypothesis.
Despite massive empirical evaluations, one of the fundamental questions in imitation learning is still not fully settled: does AIL (adversarial imitation learning) provably generalize better than BC (behavioral cloning)? We study this open problem with tabular and episodic MDPs. For vanilla AIL that uses the direct maximum likelihood estimation, we provide both negative and positive answers under the known transition setting. For some MDPs, we show that vanilla AIL has a worse sample complexity than BC. The key insight is that the state-action distribution matching principle is weak so that AIL may generalize poorly even on visited states from the expert demonstrations. For another class of MDPs, vanilla AIL is proved to generalize well even on non-visited states. Interestingly, its sample complexity is horizon-free, which provably beats BC by a wide margin. Finally, we establish a framework in the unknown transition scenario, which allows AIL to explore via reward-free exploration strategies. Compared with the best-known online apprenticeship learning algorithm, the resulting algorithm improves the sample complexity and interaction complexity.
An intensive line of research on fixed parameter tractability of integer programming is focused on exploiting the relation between the sparsity of a constraint matrix $A$ and the norm of the elements of its Graver basis. In particular, integer programming is fixed parameter tractable when parameterized by the primal tree-depth and the entry complexity of $A$, and when parameterized by the dual tree-depth and the entry complexity of $A$; both these parameterization imply that $A$ is sparse, in particular, the number of its non-zero entries is linear in the number of columns or rows, respectively. We study preconditioners transforming a given matrix to an equivalent sparse matrix if it exists and provide structural results characterizing the existence of a sparse equivalent matrix in terms of the structural properties of the associated column matroid. In particular, our results imply that the $\ell_1$-norm of the Graver basis is bounded by a function of the maximum $\ell_1$-norm of a circuit of $A$. We use our results to design a parameterized algorithm that constructs a matrix equivalent to an input matrix $A$ that has small primal/dual tree-depth and entry complexity if such an equivalent matrix exists. Our results yield parameterized algorithms for integer programming when parameterized by the $\ell_1$-norm of the Graver basis of the constraint matrix, when parameterized by the $\ell_1$-norm of the circuits of the constraint matrix, when parameterized by the smallest primal tree-depth and entry complexity of a matrix equivalent to the constraint matrix, and when parameterized by the smallest dual tree-depth and entry complexity of a matrix equivalent to the constraint matrix.
The notion of multivariate total positivity has proved to be useful in finance and psychology but may be too restrictive in other applications. In this paper we propose a concept of local association, where highly connected components in a graphical model are positively associated and study its properties. Our main motivation comes from gene expression data, where graphical models have become a popular exploratory tool. The models are instances of what we term mixed convex exponential families and we show that a mixed dual likelihood estimator has simple exact properties for such families as well as asymptotic properties similar to the maximum likelihood estimator. We further relax the positivity assumption by penalizing negative partial correlations in what we term the positive graphical lasso. Finally, we develop a GOLAZO algorithm based on block-coordinate descent that applies to a number of optimization procedures that arise in the context of graphical models, including the estimation problems described above. We derive results on existence of the optimum for such problems.
Given $1\le \ell <k$ and $\delta>0$, let $\textbf{PM}(k,\ell,\delta)$ be the decision problem for the existence of perfect matchings in $n$-vertex $k$-uniform hypergraphs with minimum $\ell$-degree at least $\delta\binom{n-\ell}{k-\ell}$. For $k\ge 3$, the decision problem in general $k$-uniform hypergraphs, equivalently $\textbf{PM}(k,\ell,0)$, is one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems. Moreover, a reduction of Szyma\'{n}ska showed that $PM(k, \ell, \delta)$ is NP-complete for $\delta < 1-(1-1/k)^{k-\ell}$. A breakthrough by Keevash, Knox and Mycroft [STOC '13] resolved this problem for $\ell=k-1$ by showing that $PM(k, k-1, \delta)$ is in P for $\delta > 1/k$. Based on their result for $\ell=k-1$, Keevash, Knox and Mycroft conjectured that $PM(k, \ell, \delta)$ is in P for every $\delta > 1-(1-1/k)^{k-\ell}$. In this paper it is shown that this decision problem for perfect matchings can be reduced to the study of the minimum $\ell$-degree condition forcing the existence of fractional perfect matchings. That is, we hopefully solve the "computational complexity" aspect of the problem by reducing it to a well-known extremal problem in hypergraph theory. In particular, together with existing results on fractional perfect matchings, this solves the conjecture of Keevash, Knox and Mycroft for $\ell\ge 0.4k$.
Model complexity is a fundamental problem in deep learning. In this paper we conduct a systematic overview of the latest studies on model complexity in deep learning. Model complexity of deep learning can be categorized into expressive capacity and effective model complexity. We review the existing studies on those two categories along four important factors, including model framework, model size, optimization process and data complexity. We also discuss the applications of deep learning model complexity including understanding model generalization capability, model optimization, and model selection and design. We conclude by proposing several interesting future directions.
We present an end-to-end framework for solving the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) using reinforcement learning. In this approach, we train a single model that finds near-optimal solutions for problem instances sampled from a given distribution, only by observing the reward signals and following feasibility rules. Our model represents a parameterized stochastic policy, and by applying a policy gradient algorithm to optimize its parameters, the trained model produces the solution as a sequence of consecutive actions in real time, without the need to re-train for every new problem instance. On capacitated VRP, our approach outperforms classical heuristics and Google's OR-Tools on medium-sized instances in solution quality with comparable computation time (after training). We demonstrate how our approach can handle problems with split delivery and explore the effect of such deliveries on the solution quality. Our proposed framework can be applied to other variants of the VRP such as the stochastic VRP, and has the potential to be applied more generally to combinatorial optimization problems.
We consider the task of learning the parameters of a {\em single} component of a mixture model, for the case when we are given {\em side information} about that component, we call this the "search problem" in mixture models. We would like to solve this with computational and sample complexity lower than solving the overall original problem, where one learns parameters of all components. Our main contributions are the development of a simple but general model for the notion of side information, and a corresponding simple matrix-based algorithm for solving the search problem in this general setting. We then specialize this model and algorithm to four common scenarios: Gaussian mixture models, LDA topic models, subspace clustering, and mixed linear regression. For each one of these we show that if (and only if) the side information is informative, we obtain parameter estimates with greater accuracy, and also improved computation complexity than existing moment based mixture model algorithms (e.g. tensor methods). We also illustrate several natural ways one can obtain such side information, for specific problem instances. Our experiments on real data sets (NY Times, Yelp, BSDS500) further demonstrate the practicality of our algorithms showing significant improvement in runtime and accuracy.