183,519 research outputs found
The Power of Dynamic Distance Oracles: Efficient Dynamic Algorithms for the Steiner Tree
In this paper we study the Steiner tree problem over a dynamic set of
terminals. We consider the model where we are given an -vertex graph
with positive real edge weights, and our goal is to maintain a tree
which is a good approximation of the minimum Steiner tree spanning a terminal
set , which changes over time. The changes applied to the
terminal set are either terminal additions (incremental scenario), terminal
removals (decremental scenario), or both (fully dynamic scenario). Our task
here is twofold. We want to support updates in sublinear time, and keep
the approximation factor of the algorithm as small as possible. We show that we
can maintain a -approximate Steiner tree of a general graph in
time per terminal addition or removal. Here,
denotes the stretch of the metric induced by . For planar graphs we achieve
the same running time and the approximation ratio of .
Moreover, we show faster algorithms for incremental and decremental scenarios.
Finally, we show that if we allow higher approximation ratio, even more
efficient algorithms are possible. In particular we show a polylogarithmic time
-approximate algorithm for planar graphs.
One of the main building blocks of our algorithms are dynamic distance
oracles for vertex-labeled graphs, which are of independent interest. We also
improve and use the online algorithms for the Steiner tree problem.Comment: Full version of the paper accepted to STOC'1
Asymptotically-Optimal Incentive-Based En-Route Caching Scheme
Content caching at intermediate nodes is a very effective way to optimize the
operations of Computer networks, so that future requests can be served without
going back to the origin of the content. Several caching techniques have been
proposed since the emergence of the concept, including techniques that require
major changes to the Internet architecture such as Content Centric Networking.
Few of these techniques consider providing caching incentives for the nodes or
quality of service guarantees for content owners. In this work, we present a
low complexity, distributed, and online algorithm for making caching decisions
based on content popularity, while taking into account the aforementioned
issues. Our algorithm performs en-route caching. Therefore, it can be
integrated with the current TCP/IP model. In order to measure the performance
of any online caching algorithm, we define the competitive ratio as the ratio
of the performance of the online algorithm in terms of traffic savings to the
performance of the optimal offline algorithm that has a complete knowledge of
the future. We show that under our settings, no online algorithm can achieve a
better competitive ratio than , where is the number of
nodes in the network. Furthermore, we show that under realistic scenarios, our
algorithm has an asymptotically optimal competitive ratio in terms of the
number of nodes in the network. We also study an extension to the basic
algorithm and show its effectiveness through extensive simulations
Sample Efficient Policy Search for Optimal Stopping Domains
Optimal stopping problems consider the question of deciding when to stop an
observation-generating process in order to maximize a return. We examine the
problem of simultaneously learning and planning in such domains, when data is
collected directly from the environment. We propose GFSE, a simple and flexible
model-free policy search method that reuses data for sample efficiency by
leveraging problem structure. We bound the sample complexity of our approach to
guarantee uniform convergence of policy value estimates, tightening existing
PAC bounds to achieve logarithmic dependence on horizon length for our setting.
We also examine the benefit of our method against prevalent model-based and
model-free approaches on 3 domains taken from diverse fields.Comment: To appear in IJCAI-201
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