82,456 research outputs found
Improving the numerical stability of fast matrix multiplication
Fast algorithms for matrix multiplication, namely those that perform
asymptotically fewer scalar operations than the classical algorithm, have been
considered primarily of theoretical interest. Apart from Strassen's original
algorithm, few fast algorithms have been efficiently implemented or used in
practical applications. However, there exist many practical alternatives to
Strassen's algorithm with varying performance and numerical properties. Fast
algorithms are known to be numerically stable, but because their error bounds
are slightly weaker than the classical algorithm, they are not used even in
cases where they provide a performance benefit.
We argue in this paper that the numerical sacrifice of fast algorithms,
particularly for the typical use cases of practical algorithms, is not
prohibitive, and we explore ways to improve the accuracy both theoretically and
empirically. The numerical accuracy of fast matrix multiplication depends on
properties of the algorithm and of the input matrices, and we consider both
contributions independently. We generalize and tighten previous error analyses
of fast algorithms and compare their properties. We discuss algorithmic
techniques for improving the error guarantees from two perspectives:
manipulating the algorithms, and reducing input anomalies by various forms of
diagonal scaling. Finally, we benchmark performance and demonstrate our
improved numerical accuracy
If the Current Clique Algorithms are Optimal, so is Valiant's Parser
The CFG recognition problem is: given a context-free grammar
and a string of length , decide if can be obtained from
. This is the most basic parsing question and is a core computer
science problem. Valiant's parser from 1975 solves the problem in
time, where is the matrix multiplication
exponent. Dozens of parsing algorithms have been proposed over the years, yet
Valiant's upper bound remains unbeaten. The best combinatorial algorithms have
mildly subcubic complexity.
Lee (JACM'01) provided evidence that fast matrix multiplication is needed for
CFG parsing, and that very efficient and practical algorithms might be hard or
even impossible to obtain. Lee showed that any algorithm for a more general
parsing problem with running time can
be converted into a surprising subcubic algorithm for Boolean Matrix
Multiplication. Unfortunately, Lee's hardness result required that the grammar
size be . Nothing was known for the more relevant
case of constant size grammars.
In this work, we prove that any improvement on Valiant's algorithm, even for
constant size grammars, either in terms of runtime or by avoiding the
inefficiencies of fast matrix multiplication, would imply a breakthrough
algorithm for the -Clique problem: given a graph on nodes, decide if
there are that form a clique.
Besides classifying the complexity of a fundamental problem, our reduction
has led us to similar lower bounds for more modern and well-studied cubic time
problems for which faster algorithms are highly desirable in practice: RNA
Folding, a central problem in computational biology, and Dyck Language Edit
Distance, answering an open question of Saha (FOCS'14)
Information Recovery from Pairwise Measurements
A variety of information processing tasks in practice involve recovering
objects from single-shot graph-based measurements, particularly those taken
over the edges of some measurement graph . This paper concerns the
situation where each object takes value over a group of different values,
and where one is interested to recover all these values based on observations
of certain pairwise relations over . The imperfection of
measurements presents two major challenges for information recovery: 1)
: a (dominant) portion of measurements are
corrupted; 2) : a significant fraction of pairs are
unobservable, i.e. can be highly sparse.
Under a natural random outlier model, we characterize the , that is, the critical threshold of non-corruption rate
below which exact information recovery is infeasible. This accommodates a very
general class of pairwise relations. For various homogeneous random graph
models (e.g. Erdos Renyi random graphs, random geometric graphs, small world
graphs), the minimax recovery rate depends almost exclusively on the edge
sparsity of the measurement graph irrespective of other graphical
metrics. This fundamental limit decays with the group size at a square root
rate before entering a connectivity-limited regime. Under the Erdos Renyi
random graph, a tractable combinatorial algorithm is proposed to approach the
limit for large (), while order-optimal recovery is
enabled by semidefinite programs in the small regime.
The extended (and most updated) version of this work can be found at
(http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.01369).Comment: This version is no longer updated -- please find the latest version
at (arXiv:1504.01369
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