Scalable Kernelization for Maximum Independent Sets

The most efficient algorithms for finding maximum independent sets in both theory and practice use reduction rules to obtain a much smaller problem instance called a kernel. The kernel can then be solved quickly using exact or heuristic algorithms---or by repeatedly kernelizing recursively in the branch-and-reduce paradigm. It is of critical importance for these algorithms that kernelization is fast and returns a small kernel. Current algorithms are either slow but produce a small kernel, or fast and give a large kernel. We attempt to accomplish both of these goals simultaneously, by giving an efficient parallel kernelization algorithm based on graph partitioning and parallel bipartite maximum matching. We combine our parallelization techniques with two techniques to accelerate kernelization further: dependency checking that prunes reductions that cannot be applied, and reduction tracking that allows us to stop kernelization when reductions become less fruitful. Our algorithm produces kernels that are orders of magnitude smaller than the fastest kernelization methods, while having a similar execution time. Furthermore, our algorithm is able to compute kernels with size comparable to the smallest known kernels, but up to two orders of magnitude faster than previously possible. Finally, we show that our kernelization algorithm can be used to accelerate existing state-of-the-art heuristic algorithms, allowing us to find larger independent sets faster on large real-world networks and synthetic instances.Comment: Extended versio

Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning

We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph partitioning together with applications and future research directions

Efficient Constellation-Based Map-Merging for Semantic SLAM

Data association in SLAM is fundamentally challenging, and handling ambiguity well is crucial to achieve robust operation in real-world environments. When ambiguous measurements arise, conservatism often mandates that the measurement is discarded or a new landmark is initialized rather than risking an incorrect association. To address the inevitable `duplicate' landmarks that arise, we present an efficient map-merging framework to detect duplicate constellations of landmarks, providing a high-confidence loop-closure mechanism well-suited for object-level SLAM. This approach uses an incrementally-computable approximation of landmark uncertainty that only depends on local information in the SLAM graph, avoiding expensive recovery of the full system covariance matrix. This enables a search based on geometric consistency (GC) (rather than full joint compatibility (JC)) that inexpensively reduces the search space to a handful of `best' hypotheses. Furthermore, we reformulate the commonly-used interpretation tree to allow for more efficient integration of clique-based pairwise compatibility, accelerating the branch-and-bound max-cardinality search. Our method is demonstrated to match the performance of full JC methods at significantly-reduced computational cost, facilitating robust object-based loop-closure over large SLAM problems.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 201

GOGMA: Globally-Optimal Gaussian Mixture Alignment

Gaussian mixture alignment is a family of approaches that are frequently used for robustly solving the point-set registration problem. However, since they use local optimisation, they are susceptible to local minima and can only guarantee local optimality. Consequently, their accuracy is strongly dependent on the quality of the initialisation. This paper presents the first globally-optimal solution to the 3D rigid Gaussian mixture alignment problem under the L2 distance between mixtures. The algorithm, named GOGMA, employs a branch-and-bound approach to search the space of 3D rigid motions SE(3), guaranteeing global optimality regardless of the initialisation. The geometry of SE(3) was used to find novel upper and lower bounds for the objective function and local optimisation was integrated into the scheme to accelerate convergence without voiding the optimality guarantee. The evaluation empirically supported the optimality proof and showed that the method performed much more robustly on two challenging datasets than an existing globally-optimal registration solution.Comment: Manuscript in press 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognitio