16,936 research outputs found
Faster Algorithms for Weighted Recursive State Machines
Pushdown systems (PDSs) and recursive state machines (RSMs), which are
linearly equivalent, are standard models for interprocedural analysis. Yet RSMs
are more convenient as they (a) explicitly model function calls and returns,
and (b) specify many natural parameters for algorithmic analysis, e.g., the
number of entries and exits. We consider a general framework where RSM
transitions are labeled from a semiring and path properties are algebraic with
semiring operations, which can model, e.g., interprocedural reachability and
dataflow analysis problems.
Our main contributions are new algorithms for several fundamental problems.
As compared to a direct translation of RSMs to PDSs and the best-known existing
bounds of PDSs, our analysis algorithm improves the complexity for
finite-height semirings (that subsumes reachability and standard dataflow
properties). We further consider the problem of extracting distance values from
the representation structures computed by our algorithm, and give efficient
algorithms that distinguish the complexity of a one-time preprocessing from the
complexity of each individual query. Another advantage of our algorithm is that
our improvements carry over to the concurrent setting, where we improve the
best-known complexity for the context-bounded analysis of concurrent RSMs.
Finally, we provide a prototype implementation that gives a significant
speed-up on several benchmarks from the SLAM/SDV project
Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning
We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph
partitioning together with applications and future research directions
Sparse Hopsets in Congested Clique
We give the first Congested Clique algorithm that computes a sparse hopset
with polylogarithmic hopbound in polylogarithmic time. Given a graph ,
a -hopset with "hopbound" , is a set of edges
added to such that for any pair of nodes and in there is a path
with at most hops in with length within of
the shortest path between and in .
Our hopsets are significantly sparser than the recent construction of
Censor-Hillel et al. [6], that constructs a hopset of size
, but with a smaller polylogarithmic hopbound. On the other
hand, the previously known constructions of sparse hopsets with polylogarithmic
hopbound in the Congested Clique model, proposed by Elkin and Neiman
[10],[11],[12], all require polynomial rounds.
One tool that we use is an efficient algorithm that constructs an
-limited neighborhood cover, that may be of independent interest.
Finally, as a side result, we also give a hopset construction in a variant of
the low-memory Massively Parallel Computation model, with improved running time
over existing algorithms
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with the MAXQ Value Function Decomposition
This paper presents the MAXQ approach to hierarchical reinforcement learning
based on decomposing the target Markov decision process (MDP) into a hierarchy
of smaller MDPs and decomposing the value function of the target MDP into an
additive combination of the value functions of the smaller MDPs. The paper
defines the MAXQ hierarchy, proves formal results on its representational
power, and establishes five conditions for the safe use of state abstractions.
The paper presents an online model-free learning algorithm, MAXQ-Q, and proves
that it converges wih probability 1 to a kind of locally-optimal policy known
as a recursively optimal policy, even in the presence of the five kinds of
state abstraction. The paper evaluates the MAXQ representation and MAXQ-Q
through a series of experiments in three domains and shows experimentally that
MAXQ-Q (with state abstractions) converges to a recursively optimal policy much
faster than flat Q learning. The fact that MAXQ learns a representation of the
value function has an important benefit: it makes it possible to compute and
execute an improved, non-hierarchical policy via a procedure similar to the
policy improvement step of policy iteration. The paper demonstrates the
effectiveness of this non-hierarchical execution experimentally. Finally, the
paper concludes with a comparison to related work and a discussion of the
design tradeoffs in hierarchical reinforcement learning.Comment: 63 pages, 15 figure
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