96 research outputs found
Reachability Preservers: New Extremal Bounds and Approximation Algorithms
We abstract and study \emph{reachability preservers}, a graph-theoretic
primitive that has been implicit in prior work on network design. Given a
directed graph and a set of \emph{demand pairs} , a reachability preserver is a sparse subgraph that preserves
reachability between all demand pairs.
Our first contribution is a series of extremal bounds on the size of
reachability preservers. Our main result states that, for an -node graph and
demand pairs of the form for a small node subset ,
there is always a reachability preserver on edges. We
additionally give a lower bound construction demonstrating that this upper
bound characterizes the settings in which size reachability preservers
are generally possible, in a large range of parameters.
The second contribution of this paper is a new connection between extremal
graph sparsification results and classical Steiner Network Design problems.
Surprisingly, prior to this work, the osmosis of techniques between these two
fields had been superficial. This allows us to improve the state of the art
approximation algorithms for the most basic Steiner-type problem in directed
graphs from the of Chlamatac, Dinitz, Kortsarz, and
Laekhanukit (SODA'17) to .Comment: SODA '1
Distributed PCP Theorems for Hardness of Approximation in P
We present a new distributed model of probabilistically checkable proofs
(PCP). A satisfying assignment to a CNF formula is
shared between two parties, where Alice knows , Bob knows
, and both parties know . The goal is to have
Alice and Bob jointly write a PCP that satisfies , while
exchanging little or no information. Unfortunately, this model as-is does not
allow for nontrivial query complexity. Instead, we focus on a non-deterministic
variant, where the players are helped by Merlin, a third party who knows all of
.
Using our framework, we obtain, for the first time, PCP-like reductions from
the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) to approximation problems in P.
In particular, under SETH we show that there are no truly-subquadratic
approximation algorithms for Bichromatic Maximum Inner Product over
{0,1}-vectors, Bichromatic LCS Closest Pair over permutations, Approximate
Regular Expression Matching, and Diameter in Product Metric. All our
inapproximability factors are nearly-tight. In particular, for the first two
problems we obtain nearly-polynomial factors of ; only
-factor lower bounds (under SETH) were known before
Fine-Grained Reductions and Quantum Speedups for Dynamic Programming
This paper points at a connection between certain (classical) fine-grained reductions and the question: Do quantum algorithms offer an advantage for problems whose (classical) best solution is via dynamic programming?
A remarkable recent result of Ambainis et al. [SODA 2019] indicates that the answer is positive for some fundamental problems such as Set-Cover and Travelling Salesman. They design a quantum O^*(1.728^n) time algorithm whereas the dynamic programming O^*(2^n) time algorithms are conjectured to be classically optimal. In this paper, fine-grained reductions are extracted from their algorithms giving the first lower bounds for problems in P that are based on the intriguing Set-Cover Conjecture (SeCoCo) of Cygan et al. [CCC 2010].
In particular, the SeCoCo implies:
- a super-linear Omega(n^{1.08}) lower bound for 3-SUM on n integers,
- an Omega(n^{k/(c_k)-epsilon}) lower bound for k-SUM on n integers and k-Clique on n-node graphs, for any integer k >= 3, where c_k <= log_2{k}+1.4427.
While far from being tight, these lower bounds are significantly stronger than what is known to follow from the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH); the well-known n^{Omega(k)} ETH-based lower bounds for k-Clique and k-SUM are vacuous when k is constant.
Going in the opposite direction, this paper observes that some "sequential" problems with previously known fine-grained reductions to a "parallelizable" core also enjoy quantum speedups over their classical dynamic programming solutions. Examples include RNA Folding and Least-Weight Subsequence
If the Current Clique Algorithms are Optimal, so is Valiant's Parser
The CFG recognition problem is: given a context-free grammar
and a string of length , decide if can be obtained from
. This is the most basic parsing question and is a core computer
science problem. Valiant's parser from 1975 solves the problem in
time, where is the matrix multiplication
exponent. Dozens of parsing algorithms have been proposed over the years, yet
Valiant's upper bound remains unbeaten. The best combinatorial algorithms have
mildly subcubic complexity.
Lee (JACM'01) provided evidence that fast matrix multiplication is needed for
CFG parsing, and that very efficient and practical algorithms might be hard or
even impossible to obtain. Lee showed that any algorithm for a more general
parsing problem with running time can
be converted into a surprising subcubic algorithm for Boolean Matrix
Multiplication. Unfortunately, Lee's hardness result required that the grammar
size be . Nothing was known for the more relevant
case of constant size grammars.
In this work, we prove that any improvement on Valiant's algorithm, even for
constant size grammars, either in terms of runtime or by avoiding the
inefficiencies of fast matrix multiplication, would imply a breakthrough
algorithm for the -Clique problem: given a graph on nodes, decide if
there are that form a clique.
Besides classifying the complexity of a fundamental problem, our reduction
has led us to similar lower bounds for more modern and well-studied cubic time
problems for which faster algorithms are highly desirable in practice: RNA
Folding, a central problem in computational biology, and Dyck Language Edit
Distance, answering an open question of Saha (FOCS'14)
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