The Matching Problem in General Graphs is in Quasi-NC

We show that the perfect matching problem in general graphs is in Quasi-NC. That is, we give a deterministic parallel algorithm which runs in $O(\log^3 n)$ time on $n^{O(\log^2 n)}$ processors. The result is obtained by a derandomization of the Isolation Lemma for perfect matchings, which was introduced in the classic paper by Mulmuley, Vazirani and Vazirani [1987] to obtain a Randomized NC algorithm. Our proof extends the framework of Fenner, Gurjar and Thierauf [2016], who proved the analogous result in the special case of bipartite graphs. Compared to that setting, several new ingredients are needed due to the significantly more complex structure of perfect matchings in general graphs. In particular, our proof heavily relies on the laminar structure of the faces of the perfect matching polytope.Comment: Accepted to FOCS 2017 (58th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science

The Linear Information Coupling Problems

Many network information theory problems face the similar difficulty of single-letterization. We argue that this is due to the lack of a geometric structure on the space of probability distribution. In this paper, we develop such a structure by assuming that the distributions of interest are close to each other. Under this assumption, the K-L divergence is reduced to the squared Euclidean metric in an Euclidean space. In addition, we construct the notion of coordinate and inner product, which will facilitate solving communication problems. We will present the application of this approach to the point-to-point channel, general broadcast channel, and the multiple access channel (MAC) with the common source. It can be shown that with this approach, information theory problems, such as the single-letterization, can be reduced to some linear algebra problems. Moreover, we show that for the general broadcast channel, transmitting the common message to receivers can be formulated as the trade-off between linear systems. We also provide an example to visualize this trade-off in a geometric way. Finally, for the MAC with the common source, we observe a coherent combining gain due to the cooperation between transmitters, and this gain can be quantified by applying our technique.Comment: 27 pages, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor