199 research outputs found
Linear-time list recovery of high-rate expander codes
We show that expander codes, when properly instantiated, are high-rate list
recoverable codes with linear-time list recovery algorithms. List recoverable
codes have been useful recently in constructing efficiently list-decodable
codes, as well as explicit constructions of matrices for compressive sensing
and group testing. Previous list recoverable codes with linear-time decoding
algorithms have all had rate at most 1/2; in contrast, our codes can have rate
for any . We can plug our high-rate codes into a
construction of Meir (2014) to obtain linear-time list recoverable codes of
arbitrary rates, which approach the optimal trade-off between the number of
non-trivial lists provided and the rate of the code. While list-recovery is
interesting on its own, our primary motivation is applications to
list-decoding. A slight strengthening of our result would implies linear-time
and optimally list-decodable codes for all rates, and our work is a step in the
direction of solving this important problem
Capacity of non-malleable codes
Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski et al., encode messages s in a manner, so that tampering the codeword causes the decoder to either output s or a message that is independent of s. While this is an impossible goal to achieve against unrestricted tampering functions, rather surprisingly non-malleable coding becomes possible against every fixed family P of tampering functions that is not too large (for instance, when I≤I 22αn for some α 0 and family P of size 2nc, in particular tampering functions with, say, cubic size circuits
Approximate Hypergraph Coloring under Low-discrepancy and Related Promises
A hypergraph is said to be -colorable if its vertices can be colored
with colors so that no hyperedge is monochromatic. -colorability is a
fundamental property (called Property B) of hypergraphs and is extensively
studied in combinatorics. Algorithmically, however, given a -colorable
-uniform hypergraph, it is NP-hard to find a -coloring miscoloring fewer
than a fraction of hyperedges (which is achieved by a random
-coloring), and the best algorithms to color the hypergraph properly require
colors, approaching the trivial bound of as
increases.
In this work, we study the complexity of approximate hypergraph coloring, for
both the maximization (finding a -coloring with fewest miscolored edges) and
minimization (finding a proper coloring using fewest number of colors)
versions, when the input hypergraph is promised to have the following stronger
properties than -colorability:
(A) Low-discrepancy: If the hypergraph has discrepancy ,
we give an algorithm to color the it with colors.
However, for the maximization version, we prove NP-hardness of finding a
-coloring miscoloring a smaller than (resp. )
fraction of the hyperedges when (resp. ). Assuming
the UGC, we improve the latter hardness factor to for almost
discrepancy- hypergraphs.
(B) Rainbow colorability: If the hypergraph has a -coloring such
that each hyperedge is polychromatic with all these colors, we give a
-coloring algorithm that miscolors at most of the
hyperedges when , and complement this with a matching UG
hardness result showing that when , it is hard to even beat the
bound achieved by a random coloring.Comment: Approx 201
Core-competitive Auctions
One of the major drawbacks of the celebrated VCG auction is its low (or zero)
revenue even when the agents have high value for the goods and a {\em
competitive} outcome could have generated a significant revenue. A competitive
outcome is one for which it is impossible for the seller and a subset of buyers
to `block' the auction by defecting and negotiating an outcome with higher
payoffs for themselves. This corresponds to the well-known concept of {\em
core} in cooperative game theory.
In particular, VCG revenue is known to be not competitive when the goods
being sold have complementarities. A bottleneck here is an impossibility result
showing that there is no auction that simultaneously achieves competitive
prices (a core outcome) and incentive-compatibility.
In this paper we try to overcome the above impossibility result by asking the
following natural question: is it possible to design an incentive-compatible
auction whose revenue is comparable (even if less) to a competitive outcome?
Towards this, we define a notion of {\em core-competitive} auctions. We say
that an incentive-compatible auction is -core-competitive if its
revenue is at least fraction of the minimum revenue of a
core-outcome. We study the Text-and-Image setting. In this setting, there is an
ad slot which can be filled with either a single image ad or text ads. We
design an core-competitive randomized auction and an
competitive deterministic auction for the Text-and-Image
setting. We also show that both factors are tight
Heavy Hitters and the Structure of Local Privacy
We present a new locally differentially private algorithm for the heavy
hitters problem which achieves optimal worst-case error as a function of all
standardly considered parameters. Prior work obtained error rates which depend
optimally on the number of users, the size of the domain, and the privacy
parameter, but depend sub-optimally on the failure probability.
We strengthen existing lower bounds on the error to incorporate the failure
probability, and show that our new upper bound is tight with respect to this
parameter as well. Our lower bound is based on a new understanding of the
structure of locally private protocols. We further develop these ideas to
obtain the following general results beyond heavy hitters.
Advanced Grouposition: In the local model, group privacy for
users degrades proportionally to , instead of linearly in
as in the central model. Stronger group privacy yields improved max-information
guarantees, as well as stronger lower bounds (via "packing arguments"), over
the central model.
Building on a transformation of Bassily and Smith (STOC 2015), we
give a generic transformation from any non-interactive approximate-private
local protocol into a pure-private local protocol. Again in contrast with the
central model, this shows that we cannot obtain more accurate algorithms by
moving from pure to approximate local privacy
Optimal CUR Matrix Decompositions
The CUR decomposition of an matrix finds an
matrix with a subset of columns of together with an matrix with a subset of rows of as well as a
low-rank matrix such that the matrix approximates the matrix
that is, , where
denotes the Frobenius norm and is the best matrix
of rank constructed via the SVD. We present input-sparsity-time and
deterministic algorithms for constructing such a CUR decomposition where
and and rank. Up to constant
factors, our algorithms are simultaneously optimal in and rank.Comment: small revision in lemma 4.
Non-malleable coding against bit-wise and split-state tampering
Non-malleable coding, introduced by Dziembowski et al. (ICS 2010), aims for protecting the integrity of information against tampering attacks in situations where error detection is impossible. Intuitively, information encoded by a non-malleable code either decodes to the original message or, in presence of any tampering, to an unrelated message. Non-malleable coding is possible against any class of adversaries of bounded size. In particular, Dziembowski et al. show that such codes exist and may achieve positive rates for any class of tampering functions of size at most (Formula presented.), for any constant (Formula presented.). However, this result is existential and has thus attracted a great deal of subsequent research on explicit constructions of non-malleable codes against natural classes of adversaries. In this work, we consider constructions of coding schemes against two well-studied classes of tampering functions; namely, bit-wise tampering functions (where the adversary tampers each bit of the encoding independently) and the much more general class of split-state adversaries (where two independent adversaries arbitrarily tamper each half of the encoded sequence). We obtain the following results for these models. (1) For bit-tampering adversaries, we obtain explicit and efficiently encodable and decodable non-malleable codes of length n achieving rate (Formula presented.) and error (also known as “exact security”) (Formula presented.). Alternatively, it is possible to improve the error to (Formula presented.) at the cost of making the construction Monte Carlo with success probability (Formula presented.) (while still allowing a compact description of the code). Previously, the best known construction of bit-tampering coding schemes was due to Dziembowski et al. (ICS 2010), which is a Monte Carlo construction achieving rate close to .1887. (2) We initiate the study of seedless non-malleable extractors as a natural variation of the notion of non-malleable extractors introduced by Dodis and Wichs (STOC 2009). We show that construction of non-malleable codes for the split-state model reduces to construction of non-malleable two-source extractors. We prove a general result on existence of seedless non-malleable extractors, which implies that codes obtained from our reduction can achieve rates arbitrarily close to 1 / 5 and exponentially small error. In a separate recent work, the authors show that the optimal rate in this model is 1 / 2. Currently, the best known explicit construction of split-state coding schemes is due to Aggarwal, Dodis and Lovett (ECCC TR13-081) which only achieves vanishing (polynomially small) rate
How to Play Unique Games on Expanders
In this note we improve a recent result by Arora, Khot, Kolla, Steurer,
Tulsiani, and Vishnoi on solving the Unique Games problem on expanders.
Given a -satisfiable instance of Unique Games with the
constraint graph , our algorithm finds an assignment satisfying at least a
fraction of all constraints if where is the edge expansion of , is the second
smallest eigenvalue of the Laplacian of , and and are some absolute
constants
Complexity of Decoding Positive-Rate Reed-Solomon Codes
The complexity of maximal likelihood decoding of the Reed-Solomon codes
is a well known open problem. The only known result in this
direction states that it is at least as hard as the discrete logarithm in some
cases where the information rate unfortunately goes to zero. In this paper, we
remove the rate restriction and prove that the same complexity result holds for
any positive information rate. In particular, this resolves an open problem
left in [4], and rules out the possibility of a polynomial time algorithm for
maximal likelihood decoding problem of Reed-Solomon codes of any rate under a
well known cryptographical hardness assumption. As a side result, we give an
explicit construction of Hamming balls of radius bounded away from the minimum
distance, which contain exponentially many codewords for Reed-Solomon code of
any positive rate less than one. The previous constructions only apply to
Reed-Solomon codes of diminishing rates. We also give an explicit construction
of Hamming balls of relative radius less than 1 which contain subexponentially
many codewords for Reed-Solomon code of rate approaching one
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