201 research outputs found
On the Symmetries of and Equivalence Test for Design Polynomials
In a Nisan-Wigderson design polynomial (in short, a design polynomial), every pair of monomials share a few common variables. A useful example of such a polynomial, introduced in [Neeraj Kayal et al., 2014], is the following: NW_{d,k}({x}) = sum_{h in F_d[z], deg(h) <= k}{ prod_{i=0}^{d-1}{x_{i, h(i)}}}, where d is a prime, F_d is the finite field with d elements, and k << d. The degree of the gcd of every pair of monomials in NW_{d,k} is at most k. For concreteness, we fix k = ceil[sqrt{d}]. The family of polynomials NW := {NW_{d,k} : d is a prime} and close variants of it have been used as hard explicit polynomial families in several recent arithmetic circuit lower bound proofs. But, unlike the permanent, very little is known about the various structural and algorithmic/complexity aspects of NW beyond the fact that NW in VNP. Is NW_{d,k} characterized by its symmetries? Is it circuit-testable, i.e., given a circuit C can we check efficiently if C computes NW_{d,k}? What is the complexity of equivalence test for NW, i.e., given black-box access to a f in F[{x}], can we check efficiently if there exists an invertible linear transformation A such that f = NW_{d,k}(A * {x})? Characterization of polynomials by their symmetries plays a central role in the geometric complexity theory program. Here, we answer the first two questions and partially answer the third.
We show that NW_{d,k} is characterized by its group of symmetries over C, but not over R. We also show that NW_{d,k} is characterized by circuit identities which implies that NW_{d,k} is circuit-testable in randomized polynomial time. As another application of this characterization, we obtain the "flip theorem" for NW.
We give an efficient equivalence test for NW in the case where the transformation A is a block-diagonal permutation-scaling matrix. The design of this algorithm is facilitated by an almost complete understanding of the group of symmetries of NW_{d,k}: We show that if A is in the group of symmetries of NW_{d,k} then A = D * P, where D and P are diagonal and permutation matrices respectively. This is proved by completely characterizing the Lie algebra of NW_{d,k}, and using an interplay between the Hessian of NW_{d,k} and the evaluation dimension
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The Random-Query Model and the Memory-Bounded Coupon Collector
We study a new model of space-bounded computation, the random-query model. The model is based on a branching-program over input variables x_1,…,x_n. In each time step, the branching program gets as an input a random index i ∈ {1,…,n}, together with the input variable x_i (rather than querying an input variable of its choice, as in the case of a standard (oblivious) branching program). We motivate the new model in various ways and study time-space tradeoff lower bounds in this model. Our main technical result is a quadratic time-space lower bound for zero-error computations in the random-query model, for XOR, Majority and many other functions. More precisely, a zero-error computation is a computation that stops with high probability and such that conditioning on the event that the computation stopped, the output is correct with probability 1. We prove that for any Boolean function f: {0,1}^n → {0,1}, with sensitivity k, any zero-error computation with time T and space S, satisfies T ⋅ (S+log n) ≥ Ω(n⋅k). We note that the best time-space lower bounds for standard oblivious branching programs are only slightly super linear and improving these bounds is an important long-standing open problem. To prove our results, we study a memory-bounded variant of the coupon-collector problem that seems to us of independent interest and to the best of our knowledge has not been studied before. We consider a zero-error version of the coupon-collector problem. In this problem, the coupon-collector could explicitly choose to stop when he/she is sure with zero-error that all coupons have already been collected. We prove that any zero-error coupon-collector that stops with high probability in time T, and uses space S, satisfies T⋅(S+log n) ≥ Ω(n^2), where n is the number of different coupons
Coresets Meet EDCS: Algorithms for Matching and Vertex Cover on Massive Graphs
As massive graphs become more prevalent, there is a rapidly growing need for
scalable algorithms that solve classical graph problems, such as maximum
matching and minimum vertex cover, on large datasets. For massive inputs,
several different computational models have been introduced, including the
streaming model, the distributed communication model, and the massively
parallel computation (MPC) model that is a common abstraction of
MapReduce-style computation. In each model, algorithms are analyzed in terms of
resources such as space used or rounds of communication needed, in addition to
the more traditional approximation ratio.
In this paper, we give a single unified approach that yields better
approximation algorithms for matching and vertex cover in all these models. The
highlights include:
* The first one pass, significantly-better-than-2-approximation for matching
in random arrival streams that uses subquadratic space, namely a
-approximation streaming algorithm that uses space
for constant .
* The first 2-round, better-than-2-approximation for matching in the MPC
model that uses subquadratic space per machine, namely a
-approximation algorithm with memory per
machine for constant .
By building on our unified approach, we further develop parallel algorithms
in the MPC model that give a -approximation to matching and an
-approximation to vertex cover in only MPC rounds and
memory per machine. These results settle multiple open
questions posed in the recent paper of Czumaj~et.al. [STOC 2018]
Decremental Single-Source Reachability in Planar Digraphs
In this paper we show a new algorithm for the decremental single-source
reachability problem in directed planar graphs. It processes any sequence of
edge deletions in total time and explicitly
maintains the set of vertices reachable from a fixed source vertex. Hence, if
all edges are eventually deleted, the amortized time of processing each edge
deletion is only , which improves upon a previously
known solution. We also show an algorithm for decremental
maintenance of strongly connected components in directed planar graphs with the
same total update time. These results constitute the first almost optimal (up
to polylogarithmic factors) algorithms for both problems.
To the best of our knowledge, these are the first dynamic algorithms with
polylogarithmic update times on general directed planar graphs for non-trivial
reachability-type problems, for which only polynomial bounds are known in
general graphs
Extractors for Polynomial Sources over
We explicitly construct the first nontrivial extractors for degree
polynomial sources over . Our extractor requires min-entropy
. Previously, no
constructions were known, even for min-entropy . A key ingredient in
our construction is an input reduction lemma, which allows us to assume that
any polynomial source with min-entropy can be generated by uniformly
random bits.
We also provide strong formal evidence that polynomial sources are unusually
challenging to extract from, by showing that even our most powerful general
purpose extractors cannot handle polynomial sources with min-entropy below
. In more detail, we show that sumset extractors cannot even
disperse from degree polynomial sources with min-entropy . In fact, this impossibility result even holds for a more
specialized family of sources that we introduce, called polynomial
non-oblivious bit-fixing (NOBF) sources. Polynomial NOBF sources are a natural
new family of algebraic sources that lie at the intersection of polynomial and
variety sources, and thus our impossibility result applies to both of these
classical settings. This is especially surprising, since we do have variety
extractors that slightly beat this barrier - implying that sumset extractors
are not a panacea in the world of seedless extraction
Efficient Statistics, in High Dimensions, from Truncated Samples
We provide an efficient algorithm for the classical problem, going back to
Galton, Pearson, and Fisher, of estimating, with arbitrary accuracy the
parameters of a multivariate normal distribution from truncated samples.
Truncated samples from a -variate normal means a samples is only revealed if it falls
in some subset ; otherwise the samples are hidden and
their count in proportion to the revealed samples is also hidden. We show that
the mean and covariance matrix can be
estimated with arbitrary accuracy in polynomial-time, as long as we have oracle
access to , and has non-trivial measure under the unknown -variate
normal distribution. Additionally we show that without oracle access to ,
any non-trivial estimation is impossible.Comment: to appear at 59th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer
Science (FOCS), 201
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