A subset $S$ of vertices in a graph $G$ is a secure total dominating set of $G$ if $S$ is a total dominating set of $G$ and, for each vertex $u \not\in S$, there is a vertex $v \in S$ such that $uv$ is an edge and $(S \setminus \{v\}) \cup \{u\}$ is also a total dominating set of $G$. We show that if $G$ is a maximal outerplanar graph of order $n$, then $G$ has a total secure dominating set of size at most $\lfloor 2n/3 \rfloor$. Moreover, if an outerplanar graph $G$ of order $n$, then each secure total dominating set has at least $\lceil (n+2)/3 \rceil$ vertices. We show that these bounds are best possible.
Relative entropy coding (REC) algorithms encode a random sample following a target distribution $Q$, using a coding distribution $P$ shared between the sender and receiver. Sadly, general REC algorithms suffer from prohibitive encoding times, at least on the order of $2^{D_{\text{KL}}[Q||P]}$, and faster algorithms are limited to very specific settings. This work addresses this issue by introducing a REC scheme utilizing space partitioning to reduce runtime in practical scenarios. We provide theoretical analyses of our method and demonstrate its effectiveness with both toy examples and practical applications. Notably, our method successfully handles REC tasks with $D_{\text{KL}}[Q||P]$ about three times what previous methods can manage and reduces the compression rate by approximately 5-15\% in VAE-based lossless compression on MNIST and INR-based lossy compression on CIFAR-10 compared to previous methods, significantly improving the practicality of REC for neural compression.
In 1982, Tuza conjectured that the size $\tau(G)$ of a minimum set of edges that intersects every triangle of a graph $G$ is at most twice the size $\nu(G)$ of a maximum set of edge-disjoint triangles of $G$. This conjecture was proved for several graph classes. In this paper, we present three results regarding Tuza's Conjecture for dense graphs. By using a probabilistic argument, Tuza proved its conjecture for graphs on $n$ vertices with minimum degree at least $\frac{7n}{8}$. We extend this technique to show that Tuza's conjecture is valid for split graphs with minimum degree at least $\frac{3n}{5}$; and that $\tau(G) < \frac{28}{15}\nu(G)$ for every tripartite graph with minimum degree more than $\frac{33n}{56}$. Finally, we show that $\tau(G)\leq \frac{3}{2}\nu(G)$ when $G$ is a complete 4-partite graph. Moreover, this bound is tight.
We consider the performance of a least-squares regression model, as judged by out-of-sample $R^2$. Shapley values give a fair attribution of the performance of a model to its input features, taking into account interdependencies between features. Evaluating the Shapley values exactly requires solving a number of regression problems that is exponential in the number of features, so a Monte Carlo-type approximation is typically used. We focus on the special case of least-squares regression models, where several tricks can be used to compute and evaluate regression models efficiently. These tricks give a substantial speed up, allowing many more Monte Carlo samples to be evaluated, achieving better accuracy. We refer to our method as least-squares Shapley performance attribution (LS-SPA), and describe our open-source implementation.
For a field $\mathbb{F}$ and integers $d$ and $k$, a set of vectors of $\mathbb{F}^d$ is called $k$-nearly orthogonal if its members are non-self-orthogonal and every $k+1$ of them include an orthogonal pair. We prove that for every prime $p$ there exists a positive constant $\delta = \delta (p)$, such that for every field $\mathbb{F}$ of characteristic $p$ and for all integers $k \geq 2$ and $d \geq k^{1/(p-1)}$, there exists a $k$-nearly orthogonal set of at least $d^{\delta \cdot k^{1/(p-1)}/ \log k}$ vectors of $\mathbb{F}^d$. In particular, for the binary field we obtain a set of $d^{\Omega( k /\log k)}$ vectors, and this is tight up to the $\log k$ term in the exponent. For comparison, the best known lower bound over the reals is $d^{\Omega( \log k / \log \log k)}$ (Alon and Szegedy, Graphs and Combin., 1999). The proof combines probabilistic and spectral arguments.
We define the relative fractional independence number of a graph $G$ with respect to another graph $H$, as $$\alpha^*(G|H)=\max_{W}\frac{\alpha(G\boxtimes W)}{\alpha(H\boxtimes W)},$$ where the maximum is taken over all graphs $W$, $G\boxtimes W$ is the strong product of $G$ and $W$, and $\alpha$ denotes the independence number. We give a non-trivial linear program to compute $\alpha^*(G|H)$ and discuss some of its properties. We show that $\alpha^*(G|H)\geq \frac{X(G)}{X(H)} \geq \frac{1}{\alpha^*(H|G)},$ where $X(G)$ can be the independence number, the zero-error Shannon capacity, the fractional independence number, the Lov\'{a}sz number, or the Schrijver's or Szegedy's variants of the Lov\'{a}sz number of a graph $G$. This inequality is the first explicit non-trivial upper bound on the ratio of the invariants of two arbitrary graphs, as mentioned earlier, which can also be used to obtain upper or lower bounds for these invariants. As explicit applications, we present new upper bounds for the ratio of the zero-error Shannon capacity of two Cayley graphs and compute new lower bounds on the Shannon capacity of certain Johnson graphs (yielding the exact value of their Haemers number). Moreover, we show that $\alpha^*(G|H)$ can be used to present a stronger version of the well-known No-Homomorphism Lemma.
The problem of an optimal mapping between Hilbert spaces $IN$ of $\left|\psi\right\rangle$ and $OUT$ of $\left|\phi\right\rangle$ based on a set of wavefunction measurements (within a phase) $\psi_l \to \phi_l$, $l=1\dots M$, is formulated as an optimization problem maximizing the total fidelity $\sum_{l=1}^{M} \omega^{(l)} \left|\langle\phi_l|\mathcal{U}|\psi_l\rangle\right|^2$ subject to probability preservation constraints on $\mathcal{U}$ (partial unitarity). Constructed operator $\mathcal{U}$ can be considered as a $IN$ to $OUT$ quantum channel; it is a partially unitary rectangular matrix of the dimension $\dim(OUT) \times \dim(IN)$ transforming operators as $A^{OUT}=\mathcal{U} A^{IN} \mathcal{U}^{\dagger}$. An iteration algorithm finding the global maximum of this optimization problem is developed and it's application to a number of problems is demonstrated. A software product implementing the algorithm is available from the authors.
We consider the problem of coloring graphs of maximum degree $\Delta$ with $\Delta$ colors in the distributed setting with limited bandwidth. Specifically, we give a $\mathsf{poly}\log\log n$-round randomized algorithm in the CONGEST model. This is close to the lower bound of $\Omega(\log \log n)$ rounds from [Brandt et al., STOC '16], which holds also in the more powerful LOCAL model. The core of our algorithm is a reduction to several special instances of the constructive Lov\'asz local lemma (LLL) and the $deg+1$-list coloring problem.
The support of a flow $x$ in a network is the subdigraph induced by the arcs $uv$ for which $x(uv)>0$. We discuss a number of results on flows in networks where we put certain restrictions on structure of the support of the flow. Many of these problems are NP-hard because they generalize linkage problems for digraphs. For example deciding whether a network ${\cal N}=(D,s,t,c)$ has a maximum flow $x$ such that the maximum out-degree of the support $D_x$ of $x$ is at most 2 is NP-complete as it contains the 2-linkage problem as a very special case. Another problem which is NP-complete for the same reason is that of computing the maximum flow we can send from $s$ to $t$ along $p$ paths (called a maximum {\bf $p$-path-flow}) in ${\cal N}$. Baier et al. (2005) gave a polynomial time algorithm which finds a $p$-path-flow $x$ whose value is at least $\frac{2}{3}$ of the value of a optimum $p$-path-flow when $p\in \{2,3\}$, and at least $\frac{1}{2}$ when $p\geq 4$. When $p=2$, they show that this is best possible unless P=NP. We show for each $p\geq 2$ that the value of a maximum $p$-path-flow cannot be approximated by any ratio larger than $\frac{9}{11}$, unless P=NP. We also consider a variant of the problem where the $p$ paths must be disjoint. For this problem, we give an algorithm which gets within a factor $\frac{1}{H(p)}$ of the optimum solution, where $H(p)$ is the $p$'th harmonic number ($H(p) \sim \ln(p)$). We show that in the case where the network is acyclic, we can find such a maximum $p$-path-flow in polynomial time for every $p$. We determine the complexity of a number of related problems concerning the structure of flows. For the special case of acyclic digraphs, some of the results we obtain are in some sense best possible.
Matrix sketching, aimed at approximating a matrix $\boldsymbol{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{N\times d}$ consisting of vector streams of length $N$ with a smaller sketching matrix $\boldsymbol{B} \in \mathbb{R}^{\ell\times d}, \ell \ll N$, has garnered increasing attention in fields such as large-scale data analytics and machine learning. A well-known deterministic matrix sketching method is the Frequent Directions algorithm, which achieves the optimal $O\left(\frac{d}{\varepsilon}\right)$ space bound and provides a covariance error guarantee of $\varepsilon = \lVert \boldsymbol{A}^\top \boldsymbol{A} - \boldsymbol{B}^\top \boldsymbol{B} \rVert_2/\lVert \boldsymbol{A} \rVert_F^2$. The matrix sketching problem becomes particularly interesting in the context of sliding windows, where the goal is to approximate the matrix $\boldsymbol{A}_W$, formed by input vectors over the most recent $N$ time units. However, despite recent efforts, whether achieving the optimal $O\left(\frac{d}{\varepsilon}\right)$ space bound on sliding windows is possible has remained an open question. In this paper, we introduce the DS-FD algorithm, which achieves the optimal $O\left(\frac{d}{\varepsilon}\right)$ space bound for matrix sketching over row-normalized, sequence-based sliding windows. We also present matching upper and lower space bounds for time-based and unnormalized sliding windows, demonstrating the generality and optimality of \dsfd across various sliding window models. This conclusively answers the open question regarding the optimal space bound for matrix sketching over sliding windows. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments with both synthetic and real-world datasets, validating our theoretical claims and thus confirming the correctness and effectiveness of our algorithm, both theoretically and empirically.
We study the stochastic bandit problem with ReLU neural network structure. We show that a $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ regret guarantee is achievable by considering bandits with one-layer ReLU neural networks; to the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to achieve such a guarantee. In this specific setting, we propose an OFU-ReLU algorithm that can achieve this upper bound. The algorithm first explores randomly until it reaches a linear regime, and then implements a UCB-type linear bandit algorithm to balance exploration and exploitation. Our key insight is that we can exploit the piecewise linear structure of ReLU activations and convert the problem into a linear bandit in a transformed feature space, once we learn the parameters of ReLU relatively accurately during the exploration stage. To remove dependence on model parameters, we design an OFU-ReLU+ algorithm based on a batching strategy, which can provide the same theoretical guarantee.