For a fixed set ${\cal H}$ of graphs, a graph $G$ is ${\cal H}$-subgraph-free if $G$ does not contain any $H \in {\cal H}$ as a (not necessarily induced) subgraph. A recently proposed framework gives a complete classification on ${\cal H}$-subgraph-free graphs (for finite sets ${\cal H}$) for problems that are solvable in polynomial time on graph classes of bounded treewidth, NP-complete on subcubic graphs, and whose NP-hardness is preserved under edge subdivision. While a lot of problems satisfy these conditions, there are also many problems that do not satisfy all three conditions and for which the complexity ${\cal H}$-subgraph-free graphs is unknown. In this paper, we study problems for which only the first two conditions of the framework hold (they are solvable in polynomial time on classes of bounded treewidth and NP-complete on subcubic graphs, but NP-hardness is not preserved under edge subdivision). In particular, we make inroads into the classification of the complexity of four such problems: $k$-Induced Disjoint Paths, $C_5$-Colouring, Hamilton Cycle and Star $3$-Colouring. Although we do not complete the classifications, we show that the boundary between polynomial time and NP-complete differs among our problems and differs from problems that do satisfy all three conditions of the framework. Hence, we exhibit a rich complexity landscape among problems for ${\cal H}$-subgraph-free graph classes.
This paper presents a method for finding a sparse representation of Barron functions. Specifically, given an $L^2$ function $f$, the inverse scale space flow is used to find a sparse measure $\mu$ minimising the $L^2$ loss between the Barron function associated to the measure $\mu$ and the function $f$. The convergence properties of this method are analysed in an ideal setting and in the cases of measurement noise and sampling bias. In an ideal setting the objective decreases strictly monotone in time to a minimizer with $\mathcal{O}(1/t)$, and in the case of measurement noise or sampling bias the optimum is achieved up to a multiplicative or additive constant. This convergence is preserved on discretization of the parameter space, and the minimizers on increasingly fine discretizations converge to the optimum on the full parameter space.
Novelty detection is a fundamental task of machine learning which aims to detect abnormal ($\textit{i.e.}$ out-of-distribution (OOD)) samples. Since diffusion models have recently emerged as the de facto standard generative framework with surprising generation results, novelty detection via diffusion models has also gained much attention. Recent methods have mainly utilized the reconstruction property of in-distribution samples. However, they often suffer from detecting OOD samples that share similar background information to the in-distribution data. Based on our observation that diffusion models can \emph{project} any sample to an in-distribution sample with similar background information, we propose \emph{Projection Regret (PR)}, an efficient novelty detection method that mitigates the bias of non-semantic information. To be specific, PR computes the perceptual distance between the test image and its diffusion-based projection to detect abnormality. Since the perceptual distance often fails to capture semantic changes when the background information is dominant, we cancel out the background bias by comparing it against recursive projections. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PR outperforms the prior art of generative-model-based novelty detection methods by a significant margin.
We consider the k-diameter clustering problem, where the goal is to partition a set of points in a metric space into $k$ clusters, minimizing the maximum distance between any two points in the same cluster. In general metrics, k-diameter is known to be NP-hard, while it has a $2$-approximation algorithm (Gonzalez'85). Complementing this algorithm, it is known that k-diameter is NP-hard to approximate within a factor better than $2$ in the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_\infty$ metrics, and within a factor of $1.969$ in the $\ell_2$ metric (Feder-Greene'88). When $k\geq 3$ is fixed, k-diameter remains NP-hard to approximate within a factor better than $2$ in the $\ell_\infty$ metric (Megiddo'90). However, its approximability in this setting has not previously been studied in the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_2$ metrics, though a $1.415$-approximation algorithm in the $\ell_2$ metric follows from a known result (Badoiu et al.'02). In this paper, we address the remaining gap by showing new hardness of approximation results that hold even when $k=3$. Specifically, we prove that 3-diameter is NP-hard to approximate within a factor better than $1.5$ in the $\ell_1$ metric, and within a factor of $1.304$ in the $\ell_2$ metric.
We prove that isomorphism of tournaments of twin width at most $k$ can be decided in time $k^{O(\log k)}n^{O(1)}$. This implies that the isomorphism problem for classes of tournaments of bounded or moderately growing twin width is in polynomial time. By comparison, there are classes of undirected graphs of bounded twin width that are isomorphism complete, that is, the isomorphism problem for the classes is as hard as the general graph isomorphism problem. Twin width is a graph parameter that has been introduced only recently (Bonnet et al., FOCS 2020), but has received a lot of attention in structural graph theory since then. On directed graphs, it is functionally smaller than clique width. We prove that on tournaments (but not on general directed graphs) it is also functionally smaller than directed tree width (and thus, the same also holds for cut width and directed path width). Hence, our result implies that tournament isomorphism testing is also fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by any of these parameters. Our isomorphism algorithm heavily employs group-theoretic techniques. This seems to be necessary: as a second main result, we show that the combinatorial Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm does not decide isomorphism of tournaments of twin width at most 35 if its dimension is $o(\sqrt n)$. (Throughout this abstract, $n$ is the order of the input graphs.)
We investigate a fundamental vertex-deletion problem called (Induced) Subgraph Hitting: given a graph $G$ and a set $\mathcal{F}$ of forbidden graphs, the goal is to compute a minimum-sized set $S$ of vertices of $G$ such that $G-S$ does not contain any graph in $\mathcal{F}$ as an (induced) subgraph. This is a generic problem that encompasses many well-known problems that were extensively studied on their own, particularly (but not only) from the perspectives of both approximation and parameterization. In this paper, we study the approximability of the problem on a large variety of graph classes. Our first result is a linear-time $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation reduction from (Induced) Subgraph Hitting on any graph class $\mathcal{G}$ of bounded expansion to the same problem on bounded degree graphs within $\mathcal{G}$. This directly yields linear-size $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximation lossy kernels for the problems on any bounded-expansion graph classes. Our second result is a linear-time approximation scheme for (Induced) Subgraph Hitting on any graph class $\mathcal{G}$ of polynomial expansion, based on the local-search framework of Har-Peled and Quanrud [SICOMP 2017]. This approximation scheme can be applied to a more general family of problems that aim to hit all subgraphs satisfying a certain property $\pi$ that is efficiently testable and has bounded diameter. Both of our results have applications to Subgraph Hitting (not induced) on wide classes of geometric intersection graphs, resulting in linear-size lossy kernels and (near-)linear time approximation schemes for the problem.
In the Euclidean Bottleneck Steiner Tree problem, the input consists of a set of $n$ points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ called terminals and a parameter $k$, and the goal is to compute a Steiner tree that spans all the terminals and contains at most $k$ points of $\mathbb{R}^2$ as Steiner points such that the maximum edge-length of the Steiner tree is minimized, where the length of a tree edge is the Euclidean distance between its two endpoints. The problem is well-studied and is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we give a $k^{O(k)} n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm for Euclidean Bottleneck Steiner Tree, which implies that the problem is fixed-parameter tractable (FPT). This settles an open question explicitly asked by Bae et al. [Algorithmica, 2011], who showed that the $\ell_1$ and $\ell_{\infty}$ variants of the problem are FPT. Our approach can be generalized to the problem with $\ell_p$ metric for any rational $1 \le p \le \infty$, or even other metrics on $\mathbb{R}^2$.
The classical way of extending an $[n, k, d]$ linear code $\C$ is to add an overall parity-check coordinate to each codeword of the linear code $\C$. This extended code, denoted by $\overline{\C}(-\bone)$ and called the standardly extended code of $\C$, is a linear code with parameters $[n+1, k, \bar{d}]$, where $\bar{d}=d$ or $\bar{d}=d+1$. This is one of the two extending techniques for linear codes in the literature. The standardly extended codes of some families of binary linear codes have been studied to some extent. However, not much is known about the standardly extended codes of nonbinary codes. For example, the minimum distances of the standardly extended codes of the nonbinary Hamming codes remain open for over 70 years. The first objective of this paper is to introduce the nonstandardly extended codes of a linear code and develop some general theory for this type of extended linear codes. The second objective is to study this type of extended codes of a number of families of linear codes, including cyclic codes and nonbinary Hamming codes. Four families of distance-optimal or dimension-optimal linear codes are obtained with this extending technique. The parameters of certain extended codes of many families of linear codes are settled in this paper.
A set $D \subseteq V$ of a graph $G=(V, E)$ is a dominating set of $G$ if each vertex $v\in V\setminus D$ is adjacent to at least one vertex in $D,$ whereas a set $D_2\subseteq V$ is a $2$-dominating (double dominating) set of $G$ if each vertex $v\in V \setminus D_2$ is adjacent to at least two vertices in $D_2.$ A graph $G$ is a $DD_2$-graph if there exists a pair ($D, D_2$) of dominating set and $2$-dominating set of $G$ which are disjoint. In this paper, we solve some open problems posed by M.Miotk, J.~Topp and P.{\.Z}yli{\'n}ski (Disjoint dominating and 2-dominating sets in graphs, Discrete Optimization, 35:100553, 2020) by giving approximation algorithms for the problem of determining a minimal spanning $DD_2$-graph of minimum size (Min-$DD_2$) with an approximation ratio of $3$; a minimal spanning $DD_2$-graph of maximum size (Max-$DD_2$) with an approximation ratio of $3$; and for the problem of adding minimum number of edges to a graph $G$ to make it a $DD_2$-graph (Min-to-$DD_2$) with an $O(\log n)$ approximation ratio. Furthermore, we prove that Min-$DD_2$ and Max-$DD_2$ are APX-complete for graphs with maximum degree $4$. We also show that Min-$DD_2$ and Max-$DD_2$ are approximable within a factor of $1.8$ and $1.5$ respectively, for any $3$-regular graph. Finally, we show the inapproximability result of Max-Min-to-$DD_2$ for bipartite graphs, that this problem can not be approximated within $n^{\frac{1}{6}-\varepsilon}$ for any $\varepsilon >0,$ unless P=NP.
We consider the online bipartite matching problem on $(k,d)$-bounded graphs, where each online vertex has at most $d$ neighbors, each offline vertex has at least $k$ neighbors, and $k\geq d\geq 2$. The model of $(k,d)$-bounded graphs is proposed by Naor and Wajc (EC 2015 and TEAC 2018) to model the online advertising applications in which offline advertisers are interested in a large number of ad slots, while each online ad slot is interesting to a small number of advertisers. They proposed deterministic and randomized algorithms with a competitive ratio of $1 - (1-1/d)^k$ for the problem, and show that the competitive ratio is optimal for deterministic algorithms. They also raised the open questions of whether strictly better competitive ratios can be achieved using randomized algorithms, for both the adversarial and stochastic arrival models. In this paper we answer both of their open problems affirmatively. For the adversarial arrival model, we propose a randomized algorithm with competitive ratio $1 - (1-1/d)^k + \Omega(d^{-4}\cdot e^{-\frac{k}{d}})$ for all $k\geq d\geq 2$. We also consider the stochastic model and show that even better competitive ratios can be achieved. We show that for all $k\geq d\geq 2$, the competitive ratio is always at least $0.8237$. We further consider the $b$-matching problem when each offline vertex can be matched at most $b$ times, and provide several competitive ratio lower bounds for the adversarial and stochastic model.
Let $G$ be a graph with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges. One of several hierarchies towards the stability number of $G$ is the exact subgraph hierarchy (ESH). On the first level it computes the Lov\'{a}sz theta function $\vartheta(G)$ as semidefinite program (SDP) with a matrix variable of order $n+1$ and $n+m+1$ constraints. On the $k$-th level it adds all exact subgraph constraints (ESC) for subgraphs of order $k$ to the SDP. An ESC ensures that the submatrix of the matrix variable corresponding to the subgraph is in the correct polytope. By including only some ESCs into the SDP the ESH can be exploited computationally. In this paper we introduce a variant of the ESH that computes $\vartheta(G)$ through an SDP with a matrix variable of order $n$ and $m+1$ constraints. We show that it makes sense to include the ESCs into this SDP and introduce the compressed ESH (CESH) analogously to the ESH. Computationally the CESH seems favorable as the SDP is smaller. However, we prove that the bounds based on the ESH are always at least as good as those of the CESH. In computational experiments sometimes they are significantly better. We also introduce scaled ESCs (SESCs), which are a more natural way to include exactness constraints into the smaller SDP and we prove that including an SESC is equivalent to including an ESC for every subgraph.