Variations on Classical and Quantum Extractors

Many constructions of randomness extractors are known to work in the presence of quantum side information, but there also exist extractors which do not [Gavinsky {\it et al.}, STOC'07]. Here we find that spectral extractors $\psi$ with a bound on the second largest eigenvalue $\lambda_{2}(\psi^{\dagger}\circ\psi)$ are quantum-proof. We then discuss fully quantum extractors and call constructions that also work in the presence of quantum correlations decoupling. As in the classical case we show that spectral extractors are decoupling. The drawback of classical and quantum spectral extractors is that they always have a long seed, whereas there exist classical extractors with exponentially smaller seed size. For the quantum case, we show that there exists an extractor with extremely short seed size $d=O(\log(1/\epsilon))$, where $\epsilon>0$ denotes the quality of the randomness. In contrast to the classical case this is independent of the input size and min-entropy and matches the simple lower bound $d\geq\log(1/\epsilon)$.Comment: 7 pages, slightly enhanced IEEE ISIT submission including all the proof

Gossip vs. Markov Chains, and Randomness-Efficient Rumor Spreading

We study gossip algorithms for the rumor spreading problem which asks one node to deliver a rumor to all nodes in an unknown network. We present the first protocol for any expander graph $G$ with $n$ nodes such that, the protocol informs every node in $O(\log n)$ rounds with high probability, and uses $\tilde{O}(\log n)$ random bits in total. The runtime of our protocol is tight, and the randomness requirement of $\tilde{O}(\log n)$ random bits almost matches the lower bound of $\Omega(\log n)$ random bits for dense graphs. We further show that, for many graph families, polylogarithmic number of random bits in total suffice to spread the rumor in $O(\mathrm{poly}\log n)$ rounds. These results together give us an almost complete understanding of the randomness requirement of this fundamental gossip process. Our analysis relies on unexpectedly tight connections among gossip processes, Markov chains, and branching programs. First, we establish a connection between rumor spreading processes and Markov chains, which is used to approximate the rumor spreading time by the mixing time of Markov chains. Second, we show a reduction from rumor spreading processes to branching programs, and this reduction provides a general framework to derandomize gossip processes. In addition to designing rumor spreading protocols, these novel techniques may have applications in studying parallel and multiple random walks, and randomness complexity of distributed algorithms.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figure. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.135

Efficient and Robust Compressed Sensing Using Optimized Expander Graphs

Expander graphs have been recently proposed to construct efficient compressed sensing algorithms. In particular, it has been shown that any n-dimensional vector that is k-sparse can be fully recovered using O(klog n) measurements and only O(klog n) simple recovery iterations. In this paper, we improve upon this result by considering expander graphs with expansion coefficient beyond 3/4 and show that, with the same number of measurements, only O(k) recovery iterations are required, which is a significant improvement when n is large. In fact, full recovery can be accomplished by at most 2k very simple iterations. The number of iterations can be reduced arbitrarily close to k, and the recovery algorithm can be implemented very efficiently using a simple priority queue with total recovery time O(nlog(n/k))). We also show that by tolerating a small penal- ty on the number of measurements, and not on the number of recovery iterations, one can use the efficient construction of a family of expander graphs to come up with explicit measurement matrices for this method. We compare our result with other recently developed expander-graph-based methods and argue that it compares favorably both in terms of the number of required measurements and in terms of the time complexity and the simplicity of recovery. Finally, we will show how our analysis extends to give a robust algorithm that finds the position and sign of the k significant elements of an almost k-sparse signal and then, using very simple optimization techniques, finds a k-sparse signal which is close to the best k-term approximation of the original signal

More Analysis of Double Hashing for Balanced Allocations

With double hashing, for a key $x$, one generates two hash values $f(x)$ and $g(x)$, and then uses combinations $(f(x) +i g(x)) \bmod n$ for $i=0,1,2,...$ to generate multiple hash values in the range $[0,n-1]$ from the initial two. For balanced allocations, keys are hashed into a hash table where each bucket can hold multiple keys, and each key is placed in the least loaded of $d$ choices. It has been shown previously that asymptotically the performance of double hashing and fully random hashing is the same in the balanced allocation paradigm using fluid limit methods. Here we extend a coupling argument used by Lueker and Molodowitch to show that double hashing and ideal uniform hashing are asymptotically equivalent in the setting of open address hash tables to the balanced allocation setting, providing further insight into this phenomenon. We also discuss the potential for and bottlenecks limiting the use this approach for other multiple choice hashing schemes.Comment: 13 pages ; current draft ; will be submitted to conference shortl

Explicit Correlation Amplifiers for Finding Outlier Correlations in Deterministic Subquadratic Time

We derandomize G. Valiant\u27s [J.ACM 62(2015) Art.13] subquadratic-time algorithm for finding outlier correlations in binary data. Our derandomized algorithm gives deterministic subquadratic scaling essentially for the same parameter range as Valiant\u27s randomized algorithm, but the precise constants we save over quadratic scaling are more modest. Our main technical tool for derandomization is an explicit family of correlation amplifiers built via a family of zigzag-product expanders in Reingold, Vadhan, and Wigderson [Ann. of Math 155(2002), 157-187]. We say that a function f:{-1,1}^d ->{-1,1}^D is a correlation amplifier with threshold 0 = 1, and strength p an even positive integer if for all pairs of vectors x,y in {-1,1}^d it holds that (i) ||| | >= tau*d implies (/gamma^d})^p*D /d)^p*D