47,603 research outputs found
Incremental Recompilation of Knowledge
Approximating a general formula from above and below by Horn formulas (its
Horn envelope and Horn core, respectively) was proposed by Selman and Kautz
(1991, 1996) as a form of ``knowledge compilation,'' supporting rapid
approximate reasoning; on the negative side, this scheme is static in that it
supports no updates, and has certain complexity drawbacks pointed out by
Kavvadias, Papadimitriou and Sideri (1993). On the other hand, the many
frameworks and schemes proposed in the literature for theory update and
revision are plagued by serious complexity-theoretic impediments, even in the
Horn case, as was pointed out by Eiter and Gottlob (1992), and is further
demonstrated in the present paper. More fundamentally, these schemes are not
inductive, in that they may lose in a single update any positive properties of
the represented sets of formulas (small size, Horn structure, etc.). In this
paper we propose a new scheme, incremental recompilation, which combines Horn
approximation and model-based updates; this scheme is inductive and very
efficient, free of the problems facing its constituents. A set of formulas is
represented by an upper and lower Horn approximation. To update, we replace the
upper Horn formula by the Horn envelope of its minimum-change update, and
similarly the lower one by the Horn core of its update; the key fact which
enables this scheme is that Horn envelopes and cores are easy to compute when
the underlying formula is the result of a minimum-change update of a Horn
formula by a clause. We conjecture that efficient algorithms are possible for
more complex updates.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
Convex computation of the region of attraction of polynomial control systems
We address the long-standing problem of computing the region of attraction
(ROA) of a target set (e.g., a neighborhood of an equilibrium point) of a
controlled nonlinear system with polynomial dynamics and semialgebraic state
and input constraints. We show that the ROA can be computed by solving an
infinite-dimensional convex linear programming (LP) problem over the space of
measures. In turn, this problem can be solved approximately via a classical
converging hierarchy of convex finite-dimensional linear matrix inequalities
(LMIs). Our approach is genuinely primal in the sense that convexity of the
problem of computing the ROA is an outcome of optimizing directly over system
trajectories. The dual infinite-dimensional LP on nonnegative continuous
functions (approximated by polynomial sum-of-squares) allows us to generate a
hierarchy of semialgebraic outer approximations of the ROA at the price of
solving a sequence of LMI problems with asymptotically vanishing conservatism.
This sharply contrasts with the existing literature which follows an
exclusively dual Lyapunov approach yielding either nonconvex bilinear matrix
inequalities or conservative LMI conditions. The approach is simple and readily
applicable as the outer approximations are the outcome of a single semidefinite
program with no additional data required besides the problem description
Minimizing Cubic and Homogeneous Polynomials over Integers in the Plane
We complete the complexity classification by degree of minimizing a
polynomial over the integer points in a polyhedron in . Previous
work shows that optimizing a quadratic polynomial over the integer points in a
polyhedral region in can be done in polynomial time, while
optimizing a quartic polynomial in the same type of region is NP-hard. We close
the gap by showing that this problem can be solved in polynomial time for cubic
polynomials.
Furthermore, we show that the problem of minimizing a homogeneous polynomial
of any fixed degree over the integer points in a bounded polyhedron in
is solvable in polynomial time. We show that this holds for
polynomials that can be translated into homogeneous polynomials, even when the
translation vector is unknown. We demonstrate that such problems in the
unbounded case can have smallest optimal solutions of exponential size in the
size of the input, thus requiring a compact representation of solutions for a
general polynomial time algorithm for the unbounded case
Levelable Sets and the Algebraic Structure of Parameterizations
Asking which sets are fixed-parameter tractable for a given parameterization
constitutes much of the current research in parameterized complexity theory.
This approach faces some of the core difficulties in complexity theory. By
focussing instead on the parameterizations that make a given set
fixed-parameter tractable, we circumvent these difficulties. We isolate
parameterizations as independent measures of complexity and study their
underlying algebraic structure. Thus we are able to compare parameterizations,
which establishes a hierarchy of complexity that is much stronger than that
present in typical parameterized algorithms races. Among other results, we find
that no practically fixed-parameter tractable sets have optimal
parameterizations
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