11,166 research outputs found
Truthful Facility Assignment with Resource Augmentation: An Exact Analysis of Serial Dictatorship
We study the truthful facility assignment problem, where a set of agents with
private most-preferred points on a metric space are assigned to facilities that
lie on the metric space, under capacity constraints on the facilities. The goal
is to produce such an assignment that minimizes the social cost, i.e., the
total distance between the most-preferred points of the agents and their
corresponding facilities in the assignment, under the constraint of
truthfulness, which ensures that agents do not misreport their most-preferred
points.
We propose a resource augmentation framework, where a truthful mechanism is
evaluated by its worst-case performance on an instance with enhanced facility
capacities against the optimal mechanism on the same instance with the original
capacities. We study a very well-known mechanism, Serial Dictatorship, and
provide an exact analysis of its performance. Although Serial Dictatorship is a
purely combinatorial mechanism, our analysis uses linear programming; a linear
program expresses its greedy nature as well as the structure of the input, and
finds the input instance that enforces the mechanism have its worst-case
performance. Bounding the objective of the linear program using duality
arguments allows us to compute tight bounds on the approximation ratio. Among
other results, we prove that Serial Dictatorship has approximation ratio
when the capacities are multiplied by any integer . Our
results suggest that even a limited augmentation of the resources can have
wondrous effects on the performance of the mechanism and in particular, the
approximation ratio goes to 1 as the augmentation factor becomes large. We
complement our results with bounds on the approximation ratio of Random Serial
Dictatorship, the randomized version of Serial Dictatorship, when there is no
resource augmentation
Activity recognition from videos with parallel hypergraph matching on GPUs
In this paper, we propose a method for activity recognition from videos based
on sparse local features and hypergraph matching. We benefit from special
properties of the temporal domain in the data to derive a sequential and fast
graph matching algorithm for GPUs.
Traditionally, graphs and hypergraphs are frequently used to recognize
complex and often non-rigid patterns in computer vision, either through graph
matching or point-set matching with graphs. Most formulations resort to the
minimization of a difficult discrete energy function mixing geometric or
structural terms with data attached terms involving appearance features.
Traditional methods solve this minimization problem approximately, for instance
with spectral techniques.
In this work, instead of solving the problem approximatively, the exact
solution for the optimal assignment is calculated in parallel on GPUs. The
graphical structure is simplified and regularized, which allows to derive an
efficient recursive minimization algorithm. The algorithm distributes
subproblems over the calculation units of a GPU, which solves them in parallel,
allowing the system to run faster than real-time on medium-end GPUs
On the Practical use of Variable Elimination in Constraint Optimization Problems: 'Still-life' as a Case Study
Variable elimination is a general technique for constraint processing. It is
often discarded because of its high space complexity. However, it can be
extremely useful when combined with other techniques. In this paper we study
the applicability of variable elimination to the challenging problem of finding
still-lifes. We illustrate several alternatives: variable elimination as a
stand-alone algorithm, interleaved with search, and as a source of good quality
lower bounds. We show that these techniques are the best known option both
theoretically and empirically. In our experiments we have been able to solve
the n=20 instance, which is far beyond reach with alternative approaches
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