An efficient rounding boundary test for pow(x,y) in double precision

18 pagesThe correct rounding of the function pow: (x,y) -> x^y is currently based on Ziv's iterative approximation process. In order to ensure its termination, cases when x^y falls on a rounding boundary must be filtered out. Such rounding boundaries are floating-point numbers and midpoints between two consecutive floating-point numbers. Detecting rounding boundaries for pow is a difficult problem. Previous approaches use repeated square root extraction followed by repeated square and multiply. This article presents a new rounding boundary test for pow in double precision which resumes to a few comparisons with pre-computed constants. These constants are deduced from worst cases for the Table Maker's Dilemma, searched over a small subset of the input domain. This is a novel use of such worst-case bounds. The resulting algorithm has been designed for a fast-on-average correctly rounded implementation of pow, considering the scarcity of rounding boundary cases. It does not stall average computations for rounding boundary detection. The article includes its correction proof and experimental results

A New Dynamic Programming Approach for Spanning Trees with Chain Constraints and Beyond

Short spanning trees subject to additional constraints are important building blocks in various approximation algorithms. Especially in the context of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), new techniques for finding spanning trees with well-defined properties have been crucial in recent progress. We consider the problem of finding a spanning tree subject to constraints on the edges in cuts forming a laminar family of small width. Our main contribution is a new dynamic programming approach where the value of a table entry does not only depend on the values of previous table entries, as it is usually the case, but also on a specific representative solution saved together with each table entry. This allows for handling a broad range of constraint types. In combination with other techniques -- including negatively correlated rounding and a polyhedral approach that, in the problems we consider, allows for avoiding potential losses in the objective through the randomized rounding -- we obtain several new results. We first present a quasi-polynomial time algorithm for the Minimum Chain-Constrained Spanning Tree Problem with an essentially optimal guarantee. More precisely, each chain constraint is violated by a factor of at most $1+\varepsilon$, and the cost is no larger than that of an optimal solution not violating any chain constraint. The best previous procedure is a bicriteria approximation violating each chain constraint by up to a constant factor and losing another factor in the objective. Moreover, our approach can naturally handle lower bounds on the chain constraints, and it can be extended to constraints on cuts forming a laminar family of constant width. Furthermore, we show how our approach can also handle parity constraints (or, more precisely, a proxy thereof) as used in the context of (Path) TSP and one of its generalizations, and discuss implications in this context.Comment: A short version of this work appeared in the proceedings of the 30th annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA 2019

An Improved Algorithm for Fixed-Hub Single Allocation Problem

This paper discusses the fixed-hub single allocation problem (FHSAP). In this problem, a network consists of hub nodes and terminal nodes. Hubs are fixed and fully connected; each terminal node is connected to a single hub which routes all its traffic. The goal is to minimize the cost of routing the traffic in the network. In this paper, we propose a linear programming (LP)-based rounding algorithm. The algorithm is based on two ideas. First, we modify the LP relaxation formulation introduced in Ernst and Krishnamoorthy (1996, 1999) by incorporating a set of validity constraints. Then, after obtaining a fractional solution to the LP relaxation, we make use of a geometric rounding algorithm to obtain an integral solution. We show that by incorporating the validity constraints, the strengthened LP often provides much tighter upper bounds than the previous methods with a little more computational effort, and the solution obtained often has a much smaller gap with the optimal solution. We also formulate a robust version of the FHSAP and show that it can guard against data uncertainty with little cost

Improving Image Restoration with Soft-Rounding

Several important classes of images such as text, barcode and pattern images have the property that pixels can only take a distinct subset of values. This knowledge can benefit the restoration of such images, but it has not been widely considered in current restoration methods. In this work, we describe an effective and efficient approach to incorporate the knowledge of distinct pixel values of the pristine images into the general regularized least squares restoration framework. We introduce a new regularizer that attains zero at the designated pixel values and becomes a quadratic penalty function in the intervals between them. When incorporated into the regularized least squares restoration framework, this regularizer leads to a simple and efficient step that resembles and extends the rounding operation, which we term as soft-rounding. We apply the soft-rounding enhanced solution to the restoration of binary text/barcode images and pattern images with multiple distinct pixel values. Experimental results show that soft-rounding enhanced restoration methods achieve significant improvement in both visual quality and quantitative measures (PSNR and SSIM). Furthermore, we show that this regularizer can also benefit the restoration of general natural images.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure