Small Space Stream Summary for Matroid Center

In the matroid center problem, which generalizes the k-center problem, we need to pick a set of centers that is an independent set of a matroid with rank r. We study this problem in streaming, where elements of the ground set arrive in the stream. We first show that any randomized one-pass streaming algorithm that computes a better than Delta-approximation for partition-matroid center must use Omega(r^2) bits of space, where Delta is the aspect ratio of the metric and can be arbitrarily large. This shows a quadratic separation between matroid center and k-center, for which the Doubling algorithm [Charikar et al., 1997] gives an 8-approximation using O(k)-space and one pass. To complement this, we give a one-pass algorithm for matroid center that stores at most O(r^2 log(1/epsilon)/epsilon) points (viz., stream summary) among which a (7+epsilon)-approximate solution exists, which can be found by brute force, or a (17+epsilon)-approximation can be found with an efficient algorithm. If we are allowed a second pass, we can compute a (3+epsilon)-approximation efficiently. We also consider the problem of matroid center with z outliers and give a one-pass algorithm that outputs a set of O((r^2+rz)log(1/epsilon)/epsilon) points that contains a (15+epsilon)-approximate solution. Our techniques extend to knapsack center and knapsack center with z outliers in a straightforward way, and we get algorithms that use space linear in the size of a largest feasible set (as opposed to quadratic space for matroid center)

Quadratic compact knapsack public-key cryptosystem

AbstractKnapsack-type cryptosystems were among the first public-key cryptographic schemes to be invented. Their NP-completeness nature and the high speed in encryption/decryption made them very attractive. However, these cryptosystems were shown to be vulnerable to the low-density subset-sum attacks or some key-recovery attacks. In this paper, additive knapsack-type public-key cryptography is reconsidered. We propose a knapsack-type public-key cryptosystem by introducing an easy quadratic compact knapsack problem. The system uses the Chinese remainder theorem to disguise the easy knapsack sequence. The encryption function of the system is nonlinear about the message vector. Under the relinearization attack model, the system enjoys a high density. We show that the knapsack cryptosystem is secure against the low-density subset-sum attacks by observing that the underlying compact knapsack problem has exponentially many solutions. It is shown that the proposed cryptosystem is also secure against some brute-force attacks and some known key-recovery attacks including the simultaneous Diophantine approximation attack and the orthogonal lattice attack

Stochastic Budget Optimization in Internet Advertising

Internet advertising is a sophisticated game in which the many advertisers "play" to optimize their return on investment. There are many "targets" for the advertisements, and each "target" has a collection of games with a potentially different set of players involved. In this paper, we study the problem of how advertisers allocate their budget across these "targets". In particular, we focus on formulating their best response strategy as an optimization problem. Advertisers have a set of keywords ("targets") and some stochastic information about the future, namely a probability distribution over scenarios of cost vs click combinations. This summarizes the potential states of the world assuming that the strategies of other players are fixed. Then, the best response can be abstracted as stochastic budget optimization problems to figure out how to spread a given budget across these keywords to maximize the expected number of clicks. We present the first known non-trivial poly-logarithmic approximation for these problems as well as the first known hardness results of getting better than logarithmic approximation ratios in the various parameters involved. We also identify several special cases of these problems of practical interest, such as with fixed number of scenarios or with polynomial-sized parameters related to cost, which are solvable either in polynomial time or with improved approximation ratios. Stochastic budget optimization with scenarios has sophisticated technical structure. Our approximation and hardness results come from relating these problems to a special type of (0/1, bipartite) quadratic programs inherent in them. Our research answers some open problems raised by the authors in (Stochastic Models for Budget Optimization in Search-Based Advertising, Algorithmica, 58 (4), 1022-1044, 2010).Comment: FINAL versio

An Improved FPTAS for 0-1 Knapsack

The 0-1 knapsack problem is an important NP-hard problem that admits fully polynomial-time approximation schemes (FPTASs). Previously the fastest FPTAS by Chan (2018) with approximation factor 1+epsilon runs in O~(n + (1/epsilon)^{12/5}) time, where O~ hides polylogarithmic factors. In this paper we present an improved algorithm in O~(n+(1/epsilon)^{9/4}) time, with only a (1/epsilon)^{1/4} gap from the quadratic conditional lower bound based on (min,+)-convolution. Our improvement comes from a multi-level extension of Chan\u27s number-theoretic construction, and a greedy lemma that reduces unnecessary computation spent on cheap items