5,031 research outputs found
Structure and Problem Hardness: Goal Asymmetry and DPLL Proofs in<br> SAT-Based Planning
In Verification and in (optimal) AI Planning, a successful method is to
formulate the application as boolean satisfiability (SAT), and solve it with
state-of-the-art DPLL-based procedures. There is a lack of understanding of why
this works so well. Focussing on the Planning context, we identify a form of
problem structure concerned with the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of the
cost of achieving the individual planning goals. We quantify this sort of
structure with a simple numeric parameter called AsymRatio, ranging between 0
and 1. We run experiments in 10 benchmark domains from the International
Planning Competitions since 2000; we show that AsymRatio is a good indicator of
SAT solver performance in 8 of these domains. We then examine carefully crafted
synthetic planning domains that allow control of the amount of structure, and
that are clean enough for a rigorous analysis of the combinatorial search
space. The domains are parameterized by size, and by the amount of structure.
The CNFs we examine are unsatisfiable, encoding one planning step less than the
length of the optimal plan. We prove upper and lower bounds on the size of the
best possible DPLL refutations, under different settings of the amount of
structure, as a function of size. We also identify the best possible sets of
branching variables (backdoors). With minimum AsymRatio, we prove exponential
lower bounds, and identify minimal backdoors of size linear in the number of
variables. With maximum AsymRatio, we identify logarithmic DPLL refutations
(and backdoors), showing a doubly exponential gap between the two structural
extreme cases. The reasons for this behavior -- the proof arguments --
illuminate the prototypical patterns of structure causing the empirical
behavior observed in the competition benchmarks
Paradigms for Parameterized Enumeration
The aim of the paper is to examine the computational complexity and
algorithmics of enumeration, the task to output all solutions of a given
problem, from the point of view of parameterized complexity. First we define
formally different notions of efficient enumeration in the context of
parameterized complexity. Second we show how different algorithmic paradigms
can be used in order to get parameter-efficient enumeration algorithms in a
number of examples. These paradigms use well-known principles from the design
of parameterized decision as well as enumeration techniques, like for instance
kernelization and self-reducibility. The concept of kernelization, in
particular, leads to a characterization of fixed-parameter tractable
enumeration problems.Comment: Accepted for MFCS 2013; long version of the pape
Differentially-Private Decision Trees with Probabilistic Robustness to Data Poisoning
Decision trees are interpretable models that are well-suited to non-linear
learning problems. Much work has been done on extending decision tree learning
algorithms with differential privacy, a system that guarantees the privacy of
samples within the training data. However, current state-of-the-art algorithms
for this purpose sacrifice much utility for a small privacy benefit. These
solutions create random decision nodes that reduce decision tree accuracy or
spend an excessive share of the privacy budget on labeling leaves. Moreover,
many works do not support or leak information about feature values when data is
continuous. We propose a new method called PrivaTree based on private
histograms that chooses good splits while consuming a small privacy budget. The
resulting trees provide a significantly better privacy-utility trade-off and
accept mixed numerical and categorical data without leaking additional
information. Finally, while it is notoriously hard to give robustness
guarantees against data poisoning attacks, we prove bounds for the expected
success rates of backdoor attacks against differentially-private learners. Our
experimental results show that PrivaTree consistently outperforms previous
works on predictive accuracy and significantly improves robustness against
backdoor attacks compared to regular decision trees
Limits of Preprocessing
We present a first theoretical analysis of the power of polynomial-time
preprocessing for important combinatorial problems from various areas in AI. We
consider problems from Constraint Satisfaction, Global Constraints,
Satisfiability, Nonmonotonic and Bayesian Reasoning. We show that, subject to a
complexity theoretic assumption, none of the considered problems can be reduced
by polynomial-time preprocessing to a problem kernel whose size is polynomial
in a structural problem parameter of the input, such as induced width or
backdoor size. Our results provide a firm theoretical boundary for the
performance of polynomial-time preprocessing algorithms for the considered
problems.Comment: This is a slightly longer version of a paper that appeared in the
proceedings of AAAI 201
An Atypical Survey of Typical-Case Heuristic Algorithms
Heuristic approaches often do so well that they seem to pretty much always
give the right answer. How close can heuristic algorithms get to always giving
the right answer, without inducing seismic complexity-theoretic consequences?
This article first discusses how a series of results by Berman, Buhrman,
Hartmanis, Homer, Longpr\'{e}, Ogiwara, Sch\"{o}ening, and Watanabe, from the
early 1970s through the early 1990s, explicitly or implicitly limited how well
heuristic algorithms can do on NP-hard problems. In particular, many desirable
levels of heuristic success cannot be obtained unless severe, highly unlikely
complexity class collapses occur. Second, we survey work initiated by Goldreich
and Wigderson, who showed how under plausible assumptions deterministic
heuristics for randomized computation can achieve a very high frequency of
correctness. Finally, we consider formal ways in which theory can help explain
the effectiveness of heuristics that solve NP-hard problems in practice.Comment: This article is currently scheduled to appear in the December 2012
issue of SIGACT New
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