4,209 research outputs found
Disjointness for measurably distal group actions and applications
We generalize Berg's notion of quasi-disjointness to actions of countable
groups and prove that every measurably distal system is quasi-disjoint from
every measure preserving system. As a corollary we obtain easy to check
necessary and sufficient conditions for two systems to be disjoint, provided
one of them is measurably distal. We also obtain a Wiener--Wintner type theorem
for countable amenable groups with distal weights and applications to weighted
multiple ergodic averages and multiple recurrence.Comment: 28 page
Communication Complexity of Permutation-Invariant Functions
Motivated by the quest for a broader understanding of communication
complexity of simple functions, we introduce the class of
"permutation-invariant" functions. A partial function is permutation-invariant if for every bijection
and every , it is the case that . Most of the commonly studied functions
in communication complexity are permutation-invariant. For such functions, we
present a simple complexity measure (computable in time polynomial in given
an implicit description of ) that describes their communication complexity
up to polynomial factors and up to an additive error that is logarithmic in the
input size. This gives a coarse taxonomy of the communication complexity of
simple functions. Our work highlights the role of the well-known lower bounds
of functions such as 'Set-Disjointness' and 'Indexing', while complementing
them with the relatively lesser-known upper bounds for 'Gap-Inner-Product'
(from the sketching literature) and 'Sparse-Gap-Inner-Product' (from the recent
work of Canonne et al. [ITCS 2015]). We also present consequences to the study
of communication complexity with imperfectly shared randomness where we show
that for total permutation-invariant functions, imperfectly shared randomness
results in only a polynomial blow-up in communication complexity after an
additive overhead
Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)
We develop a framework for approximation limits of polynomial-size linear
programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined
matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are
applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by
hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that O(n^{1/2-eps})-approximations
for CLIQUE require linear programs of size 2^{n^\Omega(eps)}. (This lower bound
applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear
optimization problem.) Moreover, we establish a similar result for
approximations of semidefinite programs by linear programs. Our main ingredient
is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma for the
high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of
certain perturbations of the unique disjointness matrix.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure
A Stable Marriage Requires Communication
The Gale-Shapley algorithm for the Stable Marriage Problem is known to take
steps to find a stable marriage in the worst case, but only
steps in the average case (with women and men). In
1976, Knuth asked whether the worst-case running time can be improved in a
model of computation that does not require sequential access to the whole
input. A partial negative answer was given by Ng and Hirschberg, who showed
that queries are required in a model that allows certain natural
random-access queries to the participants' preferences. A significantly more
general - albeit slightly weaker - lower bound follows from Segal's general
analysis of communication complexity, namely that Boolean queries
are required in order to find a stable marriage, regardless of the set of
allowed Boolean queries.
Using a reduction to the communication complexity of the disjointness
problem, we give a far simpler, yet significantly more powerful argument
showing that Boolean queries of any type are indeed required for
finding a stable - or even an approximately stable - marriage. Notably, unlike
Segal's lower bound, our lower bound generalizes also to (A) randomized
algorithms, (B) allowing arbitrary separate preprocessing of the women's
preferences profile and of the men's preferences profile, (C) several variants
of the basic problem, such as whether a given pair is married in every/some
stable marriage, and (D) determining whether a proposed marriage is stable or
far from stable. In order to analyze "approximately stable" marriages, we
introduce the notion of "distance to stability" and provide an efficient
algorithm for its computation
Computational Efficiency Requires Simple Taxation
We characterize the communication complexity of truthful mechanisms. Our
departure point is the well known taxation principle. The taxation principle
asserts that every truthful mechanism can be interpreted as follows: every
player is presented with a menu that consists of a price for each bundle (the
prices depend only on the valuations of the other players). Each player is
allocated a bundle that maximizes his profit according to this menu. We define
the taxation complexity of a truthful mechanism to be the logarithm of the
maximum number of menus that may be presented to a player.
Our main finding is that in general the taxation complexity essentially
equals the communication complexity. The proof consists of two main steps.
First, we prove that for rich enough domains the taxation complexity is at most
the communication complexity. We then show that the taxation complexity is much
smaller than the communication complexity only in "pathological" cases and
provide a formal description of these extreme cases.
Next, we study mechanisms that access the valuations via value queries only.
In this setting we establish that the menu complexity -- a notion that was
already studied in several different contexts -- characterizes the number of
value queries that the mechanism makes in exactly the same way that the
taxation complexity characterizes the communication complexity.
Our approach yields several applications, including strengthening the
solution concept with low communication overhead, fast computation of prices,
and hardness of approximation by computationally efficient truthful mechanisms
Van Kampen Colimits and Path Uniqueness
Fibred semantics is the foundation of the model-instance pattern of software
engineering. Software models can often be formalized as objects of presheaf
topoi, i.e, categories of objects that can be represented as algebras as well
as coalgebras, e.g., the category of directed graphs. Multimodeling requires to
construct colimits of models, decomposition is given by pullback.
Compositionality requires an exact interplay of these operations, i.e.,
diagrams must enjoy the Van Kampen property. However, checking the validity of
the Van Kampen property algorithmically based on its definition is often
impossible.
In this paper we state a necessary and sufficient yet efficiently checkable
condition for the Van Kampen property to hold in presheaf topoi. It is based on
a uniqueness property of path-like structures within the defining congruence
classes that make up the colimiting cocone of the models. We thus add to the
statement "Being Van Kampen is a Universal Property" by Heindel and
Soboci\'{n}ski the fact that the Van Kampen property reveals a presheaf-based
structural uniqueness feature
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