27,372 research outputs found
Clustering Improves the GoemansâWilliamson Approximation for the Max-Cut Problem
MAXâCUT is one of the well-studied NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. It can be formulated as an Integer Quadratic Programming problem and admits a simple relaxation obtained by replacing the integer âspinâ variables xi by unitary vectors vâ i. The GoemansâWilliamson rounding algorithm assigns the solution vectors of the relaxed quadratic program to a corresponding integer spin depending on the sign of the scalar product vâ iâ
râ with a random vector râ . Here, we investigate whether better graph cuts can be obtained by instead using a more sophisticated clustering algorithm. We answer this question affirmatively. Different initializations of k-means and k-medoids clustering produce better cuts for the graph instances of the most well known benchmark for MAXâCUT. In particular, we found a strong correlation of cluster quality and cut weights during the evolution of the clustering algorithms. Finally, since in general the maximal cut weight of a graph is not known beforehand, we derived instance-specific lower bounds for the approximation ratio, which give information of how close a solution is to the global optima for a particular instance. For the graphs in our benchmark, the instance specific lower bounds significantly exceed the GoemansâWilliamson guarantee
Combinatorial Continuous Maximal Flows
Maximum flow (and minimum cut) algorithms have had a strong impact on
computer vision. In particular, graph cuts algorithms provide a mechanism for
the discrete optimization of an energy functional which has been used in a
variety of applications such as image segmentation, stereo, image stitching and
texture synthesis. Algorithms based on the classical formulation of max-flow
defined on a graph are known to exhibit metrication artefacts in the solution.
Therefore, a recent trend has been to instead employ a spatially continuous
maximum flow (or the dual min-cut problem) in these same applications to
produce solutions with no metrication errors. However, known fast continuous
max-flow algorithms have no stopping criteria or have not been proved to
converge. In this work, we revisit the continuous max-flow problem and show
that the analogous discrete formulation is different from the classical
max-flow problem. We then apply an appropriate combinatorial optimization
technique to this combinatorial continuous max-flow CCMF problem to find a
null-divergence solution that exhibits no metrication artefacts and may be
solved exactly by a fast, efficient algorithm with provable convergence.
Finally, by exhibiting the dual problem of our CCMF formulation, we clarify the
fact, already proved by Nozawa in the continuous setting, that the max-flow and
the total variation problems are not always equivalent.Comment: 26 page
Local Guarantees in Graph Cuts and Clustering
Correlation Clustering is an elegant model that captures fundamental graph
cut problems such as Min Cut, Multiway Cut, and Multicut, extensively
studied in combinatorial optimization. Here, we are given a graph with edges
labeled or and the goal is to produce a clustering that agrees with the
labels as much as possible: edges within clusters and edges across
clusters. The classical approach towards Correlation Clustering (and other
graph cut problems) is to optimize a global objective. We depart from this and
study local objectives: minimizing the maximum number of disagreements for
edges incident on a single node, and the analogous max min agreements
objective. This naturally gives rise to a family of basic min-max graph cut
problems. A prototypical representative is Min Max Cut: find an cut
minimizing the largest number of cut edges incident on any node. We present the
following results: an -approximation for the problem of
minimizing the maximum total weight of disagreement edges incident on any node
(thus providing the first known approximation for the above family of min-max
graph cut problems), a remarkably simple -approximation for minimizing
local disagreements in complete graphs (improving upon the previous best known
approximation of ), and a -approximation for
maximizing the minimum total weight of agreement edges incident on any node,
hence improving upon the -approximation that follows from
the study of approximate pure Nash equilibria in cut and party affiliation
games
Many Sparse Cuts via Higher Eigenvalues
Cheeger's fundamental inequality states that any edge-weighted graph has a
vertex subset such that its expansion (a.k.a. conductance) is bounded as
follows: \phi(S) \defeq \frac{w(S,\bar{S})}{\min \set{w(S), w(\bar{S})}}
\leq 2\sqrt{\lambda_2} where is the total edge weight of a subset or a
cut and is the second smallest eigenvalue of the normalized
Laplacian of the graph. Here we prove the following natural generalization: for
any integer , there exist disjoint subsets ,
such that where
is the smallest eigenvalue of the normalized Laplacian and
are suitable absolute constants. Our proof is via a polynomial-time
algorithm to find such subsets, consisting of a spectral projection and a
randomized rounding. As a consequence, we get the same upper bound for the
small set expansion problem, namely for any , there is a subset whose
weight is at most a \bigO(1/k) fraction of the total weight and . Both results are the best possible up to constant
factors.
The underlying algorithmic problem, namely finding subsets such that the
maximum expansion is minimized, besides extending sparse cuts to more than one
subset, appears to be a natural clustering problem in its own right
Large-scale Binary Quadratic Optimization Using Semidefinite Relaxation and Applications
In computer vision, many problems such as image segmentation, pixel
labelling, and scene parsing can be formulated as binary quadratic programs
(BQPs). For submodular problems, cuts based methods can be employed to
efficiently solve large-scale problems. However, general nonsubmodular problems
are significantly more challenging to solve. Finding a solution when the
problem is of large size to be of practical interest, however, typically
requires relaxation. Two standard relaxation methods are widely used for
solving general BQPs--spectral methods and semidefinite programming (SDP), each
with their own advantages and disadvantages. Spectral relaxation is simple and
easy to implement, but its bound is loose. Semidefinite relaxation has a
tighter bound, but its computational complexity is high, especially for large
scale problems. In this work, we present a new SDP formulation for BQPs, with
two desirable properties. First, it has a similar relaxation bound to
conventional SDP formulations. Second, compared with conventional SDP methods,
the new SDP formulation leads to a significantly more efficient and scalable
dual optimization approach, which has the same degree of complexity as spectral
methods. We then propose two solvers, namely, quasi-Newton and smoothing Newton
methods, for the dual problem. Both of them are significantly more efficiently
than standard interior-point methods. In practice, the smoothing Newton solver
is faster than the quasi-Newton solver for dense or medium-sized problems,
while the quasi-Newton solver is preferable for large sparse/structured
problems. Our experiments on a few computer vision applications including
clustering, image segmentation, co-segmentation and registration show the
potential of our SDP formulation for solving large-scale BQPs.Comment: Fixed some typos. 18 pages. Accepted to IEEE Transactions on Pattern
Analysis and Machine Intelligenc
Joint Cuts and Matching of Partitions in One Graph
As two fundamental problems, graph cuts and graph matching have been
investigated over decades, resulting in vast literature in these two topics
respectively. However the way of jointly applying and solving graph cuts and
matching receives few attention. In this paper, we first formalize the problem
of simultaneously cutting a graph into two partitions i.e. graph cuts and
establishing their correspondence i.e. graph matching. Then we develop an
optimization algorithm by updating matching and cutting alternatively, provided
with theoretical analysis. The efficacy of our algorithm is verified on both
synthetic dataset and real-world images containing similar regions or
structures
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