We present sublinear-time (randomized) algorithms for finding simple cycles of length at least $k\geq 3$ and tree-minors in bounded-degree graphs. The complexity of these algorithms is related to the distance of the graph from being $C_k$-minor-free (resp., free from having the corresponding tree-minor). In particular, if the graph is far (i.e., $Ω(1)$-far) {from} being cycle-free, i.e. if one has to delete a constant fraction of edges to make it cycle-free, then the algorithm finds a cycle of polylogarithmic length in time $\tildeO(\sqrt{N})$, where $N$ denotes the number of vertices. This time complexity is optimal up to polylogarithmic factors.
The foregoing results are the outcome of our study of the complexity of {\em one-sided error} property testing algorithms in the bounded-degree graphs model. For example, we show that cycle-freeness of $N$-vertex graphs can be tested with one-sided error within time complexity $\tildeO(\poly(1/\e)\cdot\sqrt{N})$. This matches the known $Ω(\sqrt{N})$ query lower bound, and contrasts with the fact that any minor-free property admits a {\em two-sided error} tester of query complexity that only depends on the proximity parameter $\e$. For any constant $k\geq3$, we extend this result to testing whether the input graph has a simple cycle of length at least $k$. On the other hand, for any fixed tree $T$, we show that $T$-minor-freeness has a one-sided error tester of query complexity that only depends on the proximity parameter $\e$.
Our algorithm for finding cycles in bounded-degree graphs extends to general graphs, where distances are measured with respect to the actual number of edges. Such an extension is not possible with respect to finding tree-minors in $o(\sqrt{N})$ complexity.
We present an implementation and an experimental evaluation of an algorithm that, given a connected graph G (represented by adjacency lists), estimates in sublinear time, with a relative error, the Minimum Spanning Tree Weight of G; the original algorithm has been presented in "Approximating the minimum spanning tree weight in sublinear time", by Bernard Chazelle, Ronitt Rubinfeld, and Luca Trevisan (published with SIAM, DOI 10.1137/S0097539702403244). Since the theoretical performances have already been shown and demonstrated in the above-mentioned paper, our goal is, exclusively, to experime…
We give polynomial-time approximation schemes for monotone maximization problems expressible in terms of distances (up to a fixed upper bound) and efficiently solvable in graphs of bounded treewidth. These schemes apply in all fractionally treewidth-fragile graph classes, a property that is true for many natural graph classes with sublinear separators. We also provide quasipolynomial-time approximation schemes for these problems in all classes with sublinear separators.
We study the problem of maintaining a breadth-first spanning tree (BFS tree) in partially dynamic distributed networks modeling a sequence of either failures or additions of communication links (but not both). We present deterministic $(1+ε)$-approximation algorithms whose amortized time (over some number of link changes) is sublinear in $D$, the maximum diameter of the network. Our technique also leads to a deterministic $(1+ε)$-approximate incremental algorithm for single-source shortest paths (SSSP) in the sequential (usual RAM) model. Prior to our work, the state of the art was the classic…
Recently, studying fundamental graph problems in the \emph{Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) framework, inspired by the MapReduce paradigm, has gained a lot of attention. An assumption common to a vast majority of approaches is to allow $\widetildeΩ(n)$ memory per machine, where $n$ is the number of nodes in the graph and $\widetildeΩ$ hides polylogarithmic factors. However, as pointed out by Karloff et al. [SODA'10] and Czumaj et al. [STOC'18], it might be unrealistic for a single machine to have linear or only slightly sublinear memory. In this paper, we thus study a more practical varian…
We consider the problem of sampling and approximately counting an arbitrary given motif $H$ in a graph $G$, where access to $G$ is given via queries: degree, neighbor, and pair, as well as uniform edge sample queries. Previous algorithms for these tasks were based on a decomposition of $H$ into a collection of odd cycles and stars, denoted $\mathcal{D}^*(H)=\{O_{k_1}, \ldots, O_{k_q}, S_{p_1}, \ldots, S_{p_\ell}\}$. These algorithms were shown to be optimal for the case where $H$ is a clique or an odd-length cycle, but no other lower bounds were known. We present a new algorithm for sampling a…
We consider one-sided error property testing of $\mathcal{F}$-minor freeness in bounded-degree graphs for any finite family of graphs $\mathcal{F}$ that contains a minor of $K_{2,k}$, the $k$-circus graph, or the $(k\times 2)$-grid for any $k\in\mathbb{N}$. This includes, for instance, testing whether a graph is outerplanar or a cactus graph. The query complexity of our algorithm in terms of the number of vertices in the graph, $n$, is $\tilde{O}(n^{2/3} / ε^5)$. Czumaj et~al.\ showed that cycle-freeness and $C_k$-minor freeness can be tested with query complexity $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ by usin…
Dynamic programming is a powerful technique that is, unfortunately, often inherently sequential. That is, there exists no unified method to parallelize algorithms that use dynamic programming. In this paper, we attempt to address this issue in the Massively Parallel Computations (MPC) model which is a popular abstraction of MapReduce-like paradigms. Our main result is an algorithmic framework to adapt a large family of dynamic programs defined over trees. We introduce two classes of graph problems that admit dynamic programming solutions on trees. We refer to them as "(polylog)-expressible" an…
Let $G$ be an undirected, bounded degree graph with $n$ vertices. Fix a finite graph $H$, and suppose one must remove $\varepsilon n$ edges from $G$ to make it $H$-minor free (for some small constant $\varepsilon > 0$). We give an $n^{1/2+o(1)}$-time randomized procedure that, with high probability, finds an $H$-minor in such a graph. As an application, suppose one must remove $\varepsilon n$ edges from a bounded degree graph $G$ to make it planar. This result implies an algorithm, with the same running time, that produces a $K_{3,3}$ or $K_5$ minor in $G$. No prior sublinear time bound was kn…
We propose a novel randomized linear programming algorithm for approximating the optimal policy of the discounted Markov decision problem. By leveraging the value-policy duality and binary-tree data structures, the algorithm adaptively samples state-action-state transitions and makes exponentiated primal-dual updates. We show that it finds an $ε$-optimal policy using nearly-linear run time in the worst case. When the Markov decision process is ergodic and specified in some special data formats, the algorithm finds an $ε$-optimal policy using run time linear in the total number of state-action …
We design fast algorithms for repeatedly sampling from strongly Rayleigh distributions, which include random spanning tree distributions and determinantal point processes. For a graph $G=(V, E)$, we show how to approximately sample uniformly random spanning trees from $G$ in $\widetilde{O}(\lvert V\rvert)$ time per sample after an initial $\widetilde{O}(\lvert E\rvert)$ time preprocessing. For a determinantal point process on subsets of size $k$ of a ground set of $n$ elements, we show how to approximately sample in $\widetilde{O}(k^ω)$ time after an initial $\widetilde{O}(nk^{ω-1})$ time prep…
We consider the problem of designing sublinear time algorithms for estimating the cost of a minimum metric traveling salesman (TSP) tour. Specifically, given access to a $n \times n$ distance matrix $D$ that specifies pairwise distances between $n$ points, the goal is to estimate the TSP cost by performing only sublinear (in the size of $D$) queries. For the closely related problem of estimating the weight of a metric minimum spanning tree (MST), it is known that for any $\varepsilon > 0$, there exists an $\tilde{O}(n/\varepsilon^{O(1)})$ time algorithm that returns a $(1 + \varepsilon)$-appro…
The notion of treewidth, introduced by Robertson and Seymour in their seminal Graph Minors series, turned out to have tremendous impact on graph algorithmics. Many hard computational problems on graphs turn out to be efficiently solvable in graphs of bounded treewidth: graphs that can be sweeped with separators of bounded size. These efficient algorithms usually follow the dynamic programming paradigm. In the recent years, we have seen a rapid and quite unexpected development of involved techniques for solving various computational problems in graphs of bounded treewidth. One of the most surpr…
We consider the problem of uniformly generating a spanning tree, of a connected undirected graph. This process is useful to compute statistics, namely for phylogenetic trees. We describe a Markov chain for producing these trees. For cycle graphs we prove that this approach significantly outperforms existing algorithms. For general graphs we obtain no analytical bounds, but experimental results show that the chain still converges quickly. This yields an efficient algorithm, also due to the use of proper fast data structures. To bound the mixing time of the chain we describe a coupling, which we…
A conditional sampling oracle for a probability distribution D returns samples from the conditional distribution of D restricted to a specified subset of the domain. A recent line of work (Chakraborty et al. 2013 and Cannone et al. 2014) has shown that having access to such a conditional sampling oracle requires only polylogarithmic or even constant number of samples to solve distribution testing problems like identity and uniformity. This significantly improves over the standard sampling model where polynomially many samples are necessary. Inspired by these results, we introduce a computation…
For many algorithmic problems on graphs of treewidth $t$, a standard dynamic programming approach gives an algorithm with time and space complexity $2^{\mathcal{O}(t)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$. It turns out that when one considers the more restrictive parameter treedepth, it is often the case that a variation of this technique can be used to reduce the space complexity to polynomial, while retaining time complexity of the form $2^{\mathcal{O}(d)}\cdot n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$, where $d$ is the treedepth. This transfer of methodology is, however, far from automatic. For instance, for problems with c…
We present the first sublinear-time algorithm for a distributed message-passing network sto compute its edge connectivity $λ$ exactly in the CONGEST model, as long as there are no parallel edges. Our algorithm takes $\tilde O(n^{1-1/353}D^{1/353}+n^{1-1/706})$ time to compute $λ$ and a cut of cardinality $λ$ with high probability, where $n$ and $D$ are the number of nodes and the diameter of the network, respectively, and $\tilde O$ hides polylogarithmic factors. This running time is sublinear in $n$ (i.e. $\tilde O(n^{1-ε})$) whenever $D$ is. Previous sublinear-time distributed algorithms can…
We present fast and efficient randomized distributed algorithms to find Hamiltonian cycles in random graphs. In particular, we present a randomized distributed algorithm for the $G(n,p)$ random graph model, with number of nodes $n$ and $p=\frac{c\ln n}{n^δ}$ (for any constant $0 < δ\leq 1$ and for a suitably large constant $c > 0$), that finds a Hamiltonian cycle with high probability in $\tilde{O}(n^δ)$ rounds (the notation $\tilde{O}$ hides a $\text{polylog}(n)$ factor). Our algorithm works in the (synchronous) CONGEST model (i.e., only $O(\log n)$-sized messages are communicated per edge pe…
We show that Odd Cycle Transversal and Vertex Multiway Cut admit deterministic polynomial kernels when restricted to planar graphs and parameterized by the solution size. This answers a question of Saurabh. On the way to these results, we provide an efficient sparsification routine in the flavor of the sparsification routine used for the Steiner Tree problem in planar graphs (FOCS 2014). It differs from the previous work because it preserves the existence of low-cost subgraphs that are not necessarily Steiner trees in the original plane graph, but structures that turn into (supergraphs of) Ste…
The quartet distance is a measure of similarity used to compare two unrooted phylogenetic trees on the same set of $n$ leaves, defined as the number of subsets of four leaves related by a different topology in both trees. After a series of previous results, Brodal et al. [SODA 2013] presented an algorithm that computes this number in $\mathcal{O}(nd\log n)$ time, where $d$ is the maximum degree of a node. Our main contribution is a two-way reduction establishing that the complexity of computing the quartet distance between two trees on $n$ leaves is the same, up to polylogarithmic factors, as …
Training Overparametrized Neural Networks in Sublinear Time
The University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）；The Hebrew University（希伯来大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
An NP-hard graph problem may be intractable for general graphs but it could be efficiently solvable using dynamic programming for graphs with bounded width (or depth or some other structural parameter). Dynamic programming is a well-known approach used for finding exact solutions for NP-hard graph problems based on tree decompositions. It has been shown that there exist algorithms using linear time in the number of vertices and single exponential time in the width (depth or other parameters) of a given tree decomposition for many connectivity problems. Employing dynamic programming on a tree d…
We revisit the task of computing the edit distance in sublinear time. In the $(k,K)$-gap edit distance problem the task is to distinguish whether the edit distance of two strings is at most $k$ or at least $K$. It has been established by Goldenberg, Krauthgamer and Saha (FOCS '19), with improvements by Kociumaka and Saha (FOCS '20), that the $(k,k^2)$-gap problem can be solved in time $\widetilde O(n/k+\operatorname{poly}(k))$. One of the most natural questions in this line of research is whether the $(k,k^2)$-gap is best-possible for the running time $\widetilde O(n/k+\operatorname{poly}(k))$…
The Cut & Count technique and the rank-based approach have lead to single-exponential FPT algorithms parameterized by treewidth, that is, running in time $2^{O(tw)}n^{O(1)}$, for Feedback Vertex Set and connected versions of the classical graph problems (such as Vertex Cover and Dominating Set). We show that Subset Feedback Vertex Set, Subset Odd Cycle Transversal, Restricted Edge-Subset Feedback Edge Set, Node Multiway Cut, and Multiway Cut are unlikely to have such running times. More precisely, we match algorithms running in time $2^{O(tw \log tw)}n^{O(1)}$ with tight lower bounds under the…
We present an algorithm for the extensively studied Long Path and Long Cycle problems on unit disk graphs that runs in time $2^{O(\sqrt{k})}(n+m)$. Under the Exponential Time Hypothesis, Long Path and Long Cycle on unit disk graphs cannot be solved in time $2^{o(\sqrt{k})}(n+m)^{O(1)}$ [de Berg et al., STOC 2018], hence our algorithm is optimal. Besides the $2^{O(\sqrt{k})}(n+m)^{O(1)}$-time algorithm for the (arguably) much simpler Vertex Cover problem by de Berg et al. [STOC 2018] (which easily follows from the existence of a $2k$-vertex kernel for the problem), this is the only known ETH-op…
