We investigate the approximation for computing the sum $a_1+...+a_n$ with an input of a list of nonnegative elements $a_1,..., a_n$. If all elements are in the range $[0,1]$, there is a randomized algorithm that can compute an $(1+ε)$-approximation for the sum problem in time ${O({n(\log\log n)\over\sum_{i=1}^n a_i})}$, where $ε$ is a constant in $(0,1)$. Our randomized algorithm is based on the uniform random sampling, which selects one element with equal probability from the input list each time. We also prove a lower bound $Ω({n\over \sum_{i=1}^n a_i})$, which almost matches the upper bound, for this problem.
The area of sublinear algorithms have recently received a lot of attention. In this setting, one has to choose specific access model for the input, as the algorithm does not have time to pre-process or even to see the whole input. A fundamental question remained open on the relationship between the two common models for graphs -- with and without access to the "random edge" query -- namely whether it is possible to sample an edge uniformly at random in the model without access to the random edge queries. In this paper, we answer this question positively. Specifically, we give an algorithm solv…
The problem of finding the degeneracy of a graph is a subproblem of the k-core decomposition problem. In this paper, we present a (1 + epsilon)-approximate solution to the degeneracy problem which runs in O(n log n) time, sublinear in the input size for dense graphs, by sampling a small number of neighbors adjacent to high degree nodes. Our algorithm can also be extended to an O(n log n) time solution to the k-core decomposition problem. This improves upon the method by Bhattacharya et al., which implies a (4 + epsilon)-approximate ~O(n) solution to the degeneracy problem, and our techniques a…
We present a simple sublinear-time algorithm for sampling an arbitrary subgraph $H$ \emph{exactly uniformly} from a graph $G$ with $m$ edges, to which the algorithm has access by performing the following types of queries: (1) degree queries, (2) neighbor queries, (3) pair queries and (4) edge sampling queries. The query complexity and running time of our algorithm are $\tilde{O}(\min\{m, \frac{m^{ρ(H)}}{\# H}\})$ and $\tilde{O}(\frac{m^{ρ(H)}}{\# H})$, respectively, where $ρ(H)$ is the fractional edge-cover of $H$ and $\# H$ is the number of copies of $H$ in $G$. For any clique on $r$ vertices…
Sampling edges from a graph in sublinear time is a fundamental problem and a powerful subroutine for designing sublinear-time algorithms. Suppose we have access to the vertices of the graph and know a constant-factor approximation to the number of edges. An algorithm for pointwise $\varepsilon$-approximate edge sampling with complexity $O(n/\sqrt{\varepsilon m})$ has been given by Eden and Rosenbaum [SOSA 2018]. This has been later improved by Tětek and Thorup [STOC 2022] to $O(n \log(\varepsilon^{-1})/\sqrt{m})$. At the same time, $Ω(n/\sqrt{m})$ time is necessary. We close the problem, by gi…
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…
In this work, we consider the problem of sampling a $k$-clique in a graph from an almost uniform distribution in sublinear time in the general graph query model. Specifically the algorithm should output each $k$-clique with probability $(1\pm ε)/n_k$, where $n_k$ denotes the number of $k$-cliques in the graph and $ε$ is a given approximation parameter. We prove that the query complexity of this problem is \[ Θ^*\left(\max\left\{ \left(\frac{(nα)^{k/2}}{ n_k}\right)^{\frac{1}{k-1}} ,\; \min\left\{nα,\frac{nα^{k-1}}{n_k} \right\}\right\}\right). \] where $n$ is the number of vertices in the grap…
Sublinear time algorithms for approximating maximum matching size have long been studied. Much of the progress over the last two decades on this problem has been on the algorithmic side. For instance, an algorithm of Behnezhad [FOCS'21] obtains a 1/2-approximation in $\tilde{O}(n)$ time for $n$-vertex graphs. A more recent algorithm by Behnezhad, Roghani, Rubinstein, and Saberi [SODA'23] obtains a slightly-better-than-1/2 approximation in $O(n^{1+ε})$ time. On the lower bound side, Parnas and Ron [TCS'07] showed 15 years ago that obtaining any constant approximation of maximum matching size re…
In the Max $r$-SAT problem, the input is a CNF formula with $n$ variables where each clause is a disjunction of at most $r$ literals. The objective is to compute an assignment which satisfies as many of the clauses as possible. While there are a large number of polynomial-time approximation algorithms for this problem, we take the viewpoint of space complexity following [Biswas et al., Algorithmica 2021] and design sublinear-space approximation algorithms for the problem. We show that the classical algorithm of [Lieberherr and Specker, JACM 1981] can be implemented to run in $n^{O(1)}$ time wh…
The problem of sparsifying a graph or a hypergraph while approximately preserving its cut structure has been extensively studied and has many applications. In a seminal work, Benczúr and Karger (1996) showed that given any $n$-vertex undirected weighted graph $G$ and a parameter $\varepsilon \in (0,1)$, there is a near-linear time algorithm that outputs a weighted subgraph $G'$ of $G$ of size $\tilde{O}(n/\varepsilon^2)$ such that the weight of every cut in $G$ is preserved to within a $(1 \pm \varepsilon)$-factor in $G'$. The graph $G'$ is referred to as a {\em $(1 \pm \varepsilon)$-approxima…
We study the classical scheduling problem on parallel machines %with precedence constraints where the precedence graph has the bounded depth $h$. Our goal is to minimize the maximum completion time. We focus on developing approximation algorithms that use only sublinear space or sublinear time. We develop the first one-pass streaming approximation schemes using sublinear space when all jobs' processing times differ no more than a constant factor $c$ and the number of machines $m$ is at most $\tfrac {2n ε}{3 h c }$. This is so far the best approximation we can have in terms of $m$, since no pol…
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…
Rice University（莱斯大学）；Institute for Advanced Study（高等研究院）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）
We present the first provable Least-Squares Value Iteration (LSVI) algorithms that have runtime complexity sublinear in the number of actions. We formulate the value function estimation procedure in value iteration as an approximate maximum inner product search problem and propose a locality sensitive hashing (LSH) [Indyk and Motwani STOC'98, Andoni and Razenshteyn STOC'15, Andoni, Laarhoven, Razenshteyn and Waingarten SODA'17] type data structure to solve this problem with sublinear time complexity. Moreover, we build the connections between the theory of approximate maximum inner product sea…
We show an $(1+ε)$-approximation algorithm for maintaining maximum $s$-$t$ flow under $m$ edge insertions in $m^{1/2+o(1)} ε^{-1/2}$ amortized update time for directed, unweighted graphs. This constitutes the first sublinear dynamic maximum flow algorithm in general sparse graphs with arbitrarily good approximation guarantee.
Faster Sublinear Algorithms using Conditional Sampling
MIT（麻省理工学院）
概率分布D的条件采样预言机返回来自限制于域的指定子集的D的条件分布的样本。最近的一系列工作（Chakraborty et al. 2013和Cannone et al. 2014）表明，访问这样的条件抽样oracle只需要多对数甚至常数数量的样本来解决分布测试问题，如同一性和均匀性。这大大改善了标准采样模型，其中多项式许多样本是必要的。受这些结果的启发，我们引入了一个计算模型的基础上，条件采样开发次线性算法与指数更快的运行时间相比，标准的次线性算法。本文主要研究高维欧氏空间中点集上的几何优化问题。访问这些点是通过一个有条件的采样预言机提供的，该预言机将域的子集的简洁表示作为输入，并输出该子集中的均匀随机点。我们研究了两个很好的研究问题：k-均值聚类和估计的最小生成树的重量。与经典模型的已有算法相比，我们的算法具有时间、空间和样本复杂度，即维数为多项式，点数为多对数。最后，我们评论了该模型的适用性，并与现有的流，并行和分布式计算模型。
A probability distribution over the Boolean cube is monotone if flipping the value of a coordinate from zero to one can only increase the probability of an element. Given samples of an unknown monotone distribution over the Boolean cube, we give (to our knowledge) the first algorithm that learns an approximation of the distribution in statistical distance using a number of samples that is sublinear in the domain. To do this, we develop a structural lemma describing monotone probability distributions. The structural lemma has further implications to the sample complexity of basic testing tasks …
In the subgraph counting problem, we are given a input graph $G(V, E)$ and a target graph $H$; the goal is to estimate the number of occurrences of $H$ in $G$. Our focus here is on designing sublinear-time algorithms for approximately counting occurrences of $H$ in $G$ in the setting where the algorithm is given query access to $G$. This problem has been studied in several recent papers which primarily focused on specific families of graphs $H$ such as triangles, cliques, and stars. However, not much is known about approximate counting of arbitrary graphs $H$. This is in sharp contrast to the …
We revisit the complexity of the classical Interval Scheduling in the dynamic setting. In this problem, the goal is to maintain a set of intervals under insertions and deletions and report the size of the maximum size subset of pairwise disjoint intervals after each update. Nontrivial approximation algorithms are known for this problem, for both the unweighted and weighted versions [Henzinger, Neumann, Wiese, SoCG 2020]. Surprisingly, it was not known if the general exact version admits an exact solution working in sublinear time, that is, without recomputing the answer after each update. Our …
Estimating the number of subgraphs in data streams is a fundamental problem that has received great attention in the past decade. In this paper, we give improved streaming algorithms for approximately counting the number of occurrences of an arbitrary subgraph $H$, denoted $\# H$, when the input graph $G$ is represented as a stream of $m$ edges. To obtain our algorithms, we provide a generic transformation that converts constant-round sublinear-time graph algorithms in the query access model to constant-pass sublinear-space graph streaming algorithms. Using this transformation, we obtain the f…
Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学安泰经济与管理学院）；University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；John Hopcroft Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学霍普克罗夫特中心）
In the compressive phase retrieval problem, or phaseless compressed sensing, or compressed sensing from intensity only measurements, the goal is to reconstruct a sparse or approximately $k$-sparse vector $x \in \mathbb{R}^n$ given access to $y= |Φx|$, where $|v|$ denotes the vector obtained from taking the absolute value of $v\in\mathbb{R}^n$ coordinate-wise. In this paper we present sublinear-time algorithms for different variants of the compressive phase retrieval problem which are akin to the variants considered for the classical compressive sensing problem in theoretical computer science. …
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
In this paper, we study several important geometric optimization problems arising in machine learning. First, we revisit the Minimum Enclosing Ball (MEB) problem in Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$. The problem has been extensively studied before, but real-world machine learning tasks often need to handle large-scale datasets so that we cannot even afford linear time algorithms. Motivated by the recent studies on {\em beyond worst-case analysis}, we introduce the notion of stability for MEB, which is natural and easy to understand. Roughly speaking, an instance of MEB is stable, if the radius of…
The edit distance is a way of quantifying how similar two strings are to one another by counting the minimum number of character insertions, deletions, and substitutions required to transform one string into the other. A simple dynamic programming computes the edit distance between two strings of length $n$ in $O(n^2)$ time, and a more sophisticated algorithm runs in time $O(n+t^2)$ when the edit distance is $t$ [Landau, Myers and Schmidt, SICOMP 1998]. In pursuit of obtaining faster running time, the last couple of decades have seen a flurry of research on approximating edit distance, includi…
We study the problem of approximating the eigenspectrum of a symmetric matrix $\mathbf A \in \mathbb{R}^{n \times n}$ with bounded entries (i.e., $\|\mathbf A\|_{\infty} \leq 1$). We present a simple sublinear time algorithm that approximates all eigenvalues of $\mathbf{A}$ up to additive error $\pm εn$ using those of a randomly sampled $\tilde {O}\left (\frac{\log^3 n}{ε^3}\right ) \times \tilde O\left (\frac{\log^3 n}{ε^3}\right )$ principal submatrix. Our result can be viewed as a concentration bound on the complete eigenspectrum of a random submatrix, significantly extending known bounds o…
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…
Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland（马里兰大学高级计算机研究所）；Center for Theoretical Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院理论物理中心）；Pennsylvania State University（宾夕法尼亚州立大学）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
We investigate sublinear classical and quantum algorithms for matrix games, a fundamental problem in optimization and machine learning, with provable guarantees. Given a matrix $A\in\mathbb{R}^{n\times d}$, sublinear algorithms for the matrix game $\min_{x\in\mathcal{X}}\max_{y\in\mathcal{Y}} y^{\top} Ax$ were previously known only for two special cases: (1) $\mathcal{Y}$ being the $\ell_{1}$-norm unit ball, and (2) $\mathcal{X}$ being either the $\ell_{1}$- or the $\ell_{2}$-norm unit ball. We give a sublinear classical algorithm that can interpolate smoothly between these two cases: for any …
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Hierarchical clustering over graphs is a fundamental task in data mining and machine learning with applications in domains such as phylogenetics, social network analysis, and information retrieval. Specifically, we consider the recently popularized objective function for hierarchical clustering due to Dasgupta. Previous algorithms for (approximately) minimizing this objective function require linear time/space complexity. In many applications the underlying graph can be massive in size making it computationally challenging to process the graph even using a linear time/space algorithm. As a res…
