We consider a fundamental algorithmic question in spectral graph theory: Compute a spectral sparsifier of random-walk matrix-polynomial $$L_α(G)=D-\sum_{r=1}^dα_rD(D^{-1}A)^r$$ where $A$ is the adjacency matrix of a weighted, undirected graph, $D$ is the diagonal matrix of weighted degrees, and $α=(α_1...α_d)$ are nonnegative coefficients with $\sum_{r=1}^dα_r=1$. Recall that $D^{-1}A$ is the transition matrix of random walks on the graph. The sparsification of $L_α(G)$ appears to be algorithmically challenging as the matrix power $(D^{-1}A)^r$ is defined by all paths of length $r$, whose precise calculation would be prohibitively expensive.
In this paper, we develop the first nearly linear time algorithm for this sparsification problem: For any $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, $d$ coefficients $α$, and $ε> 0$, our algorithm runs in time $O(d^2m\log^2n/ε^{2})$ to construct a Laplacian matrix $\tilde{L}=D-\tilde{A}$ with $O(n\log n/ε^{2})$ non-zeros such that $\tilde{L}\approx_εL_α(G)$.
Matrix polynomials arise in mathematical analysis of matrix functions as well as numerical solutions of matrix equations. Our work is particularly motivated by the algorithmic problems for speeding up the classic Newton's method in applications such as computing the inverse square-root of the precision matrix of a Gaussian random field, as well as computing the $q$th-root transition (for $q\geq1$) in a time-reversible Markov model. The key algorithmic step for both applications is the construction of a spectral sparsifier of a constant degree random-walk matrix-polynomials introduced by Newton's method. Our algorithm can also be used to build efficient data structures for effective resistances for multi-step time-reversible Markov models, and we anticipate that it could be useful for other tasks in network analysis.
An important open question in the area of vertex sparsification is whether $(1+ε)$-approximate cut-preserving vertex sparsifiers with size close to the number of terminals exist. The work Chalermsook et al. (SODA 2021) introduced a relaxation called connectivity-$c$ mimicking networks, which asks to construct a vertex sparsifier which preserves connectivity among $k$ terminals exactly up to the value of $c$, and showed applications to dynamic connectivity data structures and survivable network design. We show that connectivity-$c$ mimicking networks with $\widetilde{O}(kc^3)$ edges exist and c…
A sparsifier of a graph $G$ (Benczúr and Karger; Spielman and Teng) is a sparse weighted subgraph $\tilde G$ that approximately retains the cut structure of $G$. For general graphs, non-trivial sparsification is possible only by using weighted graphs in which different edges have different weights. Even for graphs that admit unweighted sparsifiers, there are no known polynomial time algorithms that find such unweighted sparsifiers. We study a weaker notion of sparsification suggested by Oveis Gharan, in which the number of edges in each cut $(S,\bar S)$ is not approximated within a multiplicat…
We propose polynomial-time algorithms that sparsify planar and bounded-genus graphs while preserving optimal or near-optimal solutions to Steiner problems. Our main contribution is a polynomial-time algorithm that, given an unweighted graph $G$ embedded on a surface of genus $g$ and a designated face $f$ bounded by a simple cycle of length $k$, uncovers a set $F \subseteq E(G)$ of size polynomial in $g$ and $k$ that contains an optimal Steiner tree for any set of terminals that is a subset of the vertices of $f$. We apply this general theorem to prove that: * given an unweighted graph $G$ embe…
We present several sparsification lower and upper bounds for classic problems in graph theory and logic. For the problems 4-Coloring, (Directed) Hamiltonian Cycle, and (Connected) Dominating Set, we prove that there is no polynomial-time algorithm that reduces any n-vertex input to an equivalent instance, of an arbitrary problem, with bitsize O(n^{2-e}) for e > 0, unless NP is in coNP/poly and the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses. These results imply that existing linear-vertex kernels for k-Nonblocker and k-Max Leaf Spanning Tree (the parametric duals of (Connected) Dominating Set) cannot …
We investigate whether an n-vertex instance (G,k) of Treewidth, asking whether the graph G has treewidth at most k, can efficiently be made sparse without changing its answer. By giving a special form of OR-cross-composition, we prove that this is unlikely: if there is an e > 0 and a polynomial-time algorithm that reduces n-vertex Treewidth instances to equivalent instances, of an arbitrary problem, with O(n^{2-e}) bits, then NP is in coNP/poly and the polynomial hierarchy collapses to its third level. Our sparsification lower bound has implications for structural parameterizations of Treewidt…
A cut sparsifier is a reweighted subgraph that maintains the weights of the cuts of the original graph up to a multiplicative factor of $(1\pmε)$. This paper considers computing cut sparsifiers of weighted graphs of size $O(n\log (n)/ε^2)$. Our algorithm computes such a sparsifier in time $O(m\cdot\min(α(n)\log(m/n),\log (n)))$, both for graphs with polynomially bounded and unbounded integer weights, where $α(\cdot)$ is the functional inverse of Ackermann's function. This improves upon the state of the art by Benczúr and Karger (SICOMP 2015), which takes $O(m\log^2 (n))$ time. For unbounded we…
For "large" class $\mathcal{C}$ of continuous probability density functions (p.d.f.), we demonstrate that for every $w\in\mathcal{C}$ there is mixture of discrete Binomial distributions (MDBD) with $T\geq N\sqrt{ϕ_{w}/δ}$ distinct Binomial distributions $B(\cdot,N)$ that $δ$-approximates a discretized p.d.f. $\widehat{w}(i/N)\triangleq w(i/N)/[\sum_{\ell=0}^{N}w(\ell/N)]$ for all $i\in[3:N-3]$, where $ϕ_{w}\geq\max_{x\in[0,1]}|w(x)|$. Also, we give two efficient parallel algorithms to find such MDBD. Moreover, we propose a sequential algorithm that on input MDBD with $N=2^k$ for $k\in\mathbb{N…
In vertex-cut sparsification, given a graph $G=(V,E)$ with a terminal set $T\subseteq V$, we wish to construct a graph $G'=(V',E')$ with $T\subseteq V'$, such that for every two sets of terminals $A,B\subseteq T$, the size of a minimum $(A,B)$-vertex-cut in $G'$ is the same as in $G$. In the most basic setting, $G$ is unweighted and undirected, and we wish to bound the size of $G'$ by a function of $k=|T|$. Kratsch and Wahlström [JACM 2020] proved that every graph $G$ (possibly directed), admits a vertex-cut sparsifier $G'$ with $O(k^3)$ vertices, which can in fact be constructed in randomized…
Given a weighted graph $G$ and an error parameter $ε> 0$, the {\em graph sparsification} problem requires sampling edges in $G$ and giving the sampled edges appropriate weights to obtain a sparse graph $G_ε$ (containing O(n\log n) edges in expectation) with the following property: the weight of every cut in $G_ε$ is within a factor of $(1\pm ε)$ of the weight of the corresponding cut in $G$. We provide a generic framework that sets out sufficient conditions for any particular sampling scheme to result in good sparsifiers, and obtain a set of results by simple instantiations of this framework. …
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…
We introduce a new approach to spectral sparsification that approximates the quadratic form of the pseudoinverse of a graph Laplacian restricted to a subspace. We show that sparsifiers with a near-linear number of edges in the dimension of the subspace exist. Our setting generalizes that of Schur complement sparsifiers. Our approach produces sparsifiers by sampling a uniformly random spanning tree of the input graph and using that tree to guide an edge elimination procedure that contracts, deletes, and reweights edges. In the context of Schur complement sparsifiers, our approach has two benefi…
For an undirected/directed hypergraph $G=(V,E)$, its Laplacian $L_G\colon\mathbb{R}^V\to \mathbb{R}^V$ is defined such that its ``quadratic form'' $\boldsymbol{x}^\top L_G(\boldsymbol{x})$ captures the cut information of $G$. In particular, $\boldsymbol{1}_S^\top L_G(\boldsymbol{1}_S)$ coincides with the cut size of $S \subseteq V$, where $\boldsymbol{1}_S \in \mathbb{R}^V$ is the characteristic vector of $S$. A weighted subgraph $H$ of a hypergraph $G$ on a vertex set $V$ is said to be an $ε$-spectral sparsifier of $G$ if $(1-ε)\boldsymbol{x}^\top L_H(\boldsymbol{x}) \leq \boldsymbol{x}^\top …
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 algorithms for spectral graph sparsification. The input is a graph $G$ with $n$ vertices and $m$ edges, and the output is a sparse graph $\tilde{G}$ that approximates $G$ in an algebraic sense. Concretely, for all vectors $x$ and any $ε>0$, $\tilde{G}$ satisfies $$ (1-ε) x^T L_G x \leq x^T L_{\tilde{G}} x \leq (1+ε) x^T L_G x, $$ where $L_G$ and $L_{\tilde{G}}$ are the Laplacians of $G$ and $\tilde{G}$ respectively. We show that the fastest known algorithm for computing a sparsifier with $O(n\log n/ε^2)$ edges can actually run in $\tilde{O}(m\log^2 n)$ time, an $O(\log n)$ factor fast…
A motif is a frequently occurring subgraph of a given directed or undirected graph $G$. Motifs capture higher order organizational structure of $G$ beyond edge relationships, and, therefore, have found wide applications such as in graph clustering, community detection, and analysis of biological and physical networks to name a few. In these applications, the cut structure of motifs plays a crucial role as vertices are partitioned into clusters by cuts whose conductance is based on the number of instances of a particular motif, as opposed to just the number of edges, crossing the cuts. In this …
We design an FPRAS to count the number of bases of any matroid given by an independent set oracle, and to estimate the partition function of the random cluster model of any matroid in the regime where $0<q<1$. Consequently, we can sample random spanning forests in a graph and (approximately) compute the reliability polynomial of any matroid. We also prove the thirty year old conjecture of Mihail and Vazirani that the bases exchange graph of any matroid has expansion at least 1. One of our key observations is a close connection between pure simplicial complexes and multiaffine homogeneous polyn…
Cut and spectral sparsification of graphs have numerous applications, including e.g. speeding up algorithms for cuts and Laplacian solvers. These powerful notions have recently been extended to hypergraphs, which are much richer and may offer new applications. However, the current bounds on the size of hypergraph sparsifiers are not as tight as the corresponding bounds for graphs. Our first result is a polynomial-time algorithm that, given a hypergraph on $n$ vertices with maximum hyperedge size $r$, outputs an $ε$-spectral sparsifier with $O^*(nr)$ hyperedges, where $O^*$ suppresses $(ε^{-1} …
Kernel matrices, as well as weighted graphs represented by them, are ubiquitous objects in machine learning, statistics and other related fields. The main drawback of using kernel methods (learning and inference using kernel matrices) is efficiency -- given $n$ input points, most kernel-based algorithms need to materialize the full $n \times n$ kernel matrix before performing any subsequent computation, thus incurring $Ω(n^2)$ runtime. Breaking this quadratic barrier for various problems has therefore, been a subject of extensive research efforts. We break the quadratic barrier and obtain $\te…
In this paper we consider the problem of computing spectral approximations to graphs in the single pass dynamic streaming model. We provide a linear sketching based solution that given a stream of edge insertions and deletions to a $n$-node undirected graph, uses $\tilde O(n)$ space, processes each update in $\tilde O(1)$ time, and with high probability recovers a spectral sparsifier in $\tilde O(n)$ time. Prior to our work, state of the art results either used near optimal $\tilde O(n)$ space complexity, but brute-force $Ω(n^2)$ recovery time [Kapralov et al.'14], or with subquadratic runtime…
The famous Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) is polynomial time solvable on both undirected and directed graphs. Gutin et al. [Discrete Applied Math 217 (2016)] generalized these results by proving that CPP on $c$-edge-colored graphs is polynomial time solvable for every $c\geq 2$. In CPP on weighted edge-colored graphs $G$, we wish to find a minimum weight properly colored closed walk containing all edges of $G$ (a walk is properly colored if every two consecutive edges are of different color, including the last and first edges in a closed walk). In this paper, we consider CPP on arc-colored digr…
Makespan scheduling on identical machines is one of the most basic and fundamental packing problems studied in the discrete optimization literature. It asks for an assignment of $n$ jobs to a set of $m$ identical machines that minimizes the makespan. The problem is strongly NP-hard, and thus we do not expect a $(1+ε)$-approximation algorithm with a running time that depends polynomially on $1/ε$. Furthermore, Chen et al. [3] recently showed that a running time of $2^{(1/ε)^{1-δ}}+\text{poly}(n)$ for any $δ>0$ would imply that the Exponential Time Hypothesis (ETH) fails. A long sequence of algo…
We present an affine-invariant random walk for drawing uniform random samples from a convex body $\mathcal{K} \subset \mathbb{R}^n$ that uses maximum volume inscribed ellipsoids, known as John's ellipsoids, for the proposal distribution. Our algorithm makes steps using uniform sampling from the John's ellipsoid of the symmetrization of $\mathcal{K}$ at the current point. We show that from a warm start, the random walk mixes in $\widetilde{O}(n^7)$ steps where the log factors depend only on constants associated with the warm start and desired total variation distance to uniformity. We also prov…
We initiate the study of a fundamental combinatorial problem: Given a capacitated graph $G=(V,E)$, find a shortest walk ("route") from a source $s\in V$ to a destination $t\in V$ that includes all vertices specified by a set $\mathscr{W}\subseteq V$: the \emph{waypoints}. This waypoint routing problem finds immediate applications in the context of modern networked distributed systems. Our main contribution is an exact polynomial-time algorithm for graphs of bounded treewidth. We also show that if the number of waypoints is logarithmically bounded, exact polynomial-time algorithms exist even fo…
In this paper we consider the \emph{fully-dynamic} All-Pairs Effective Resistance problem, where the goal is to maintain effective resistances on a graph $G$ among any pair of query vertices under an intermixed sequence of edge insertions and deletions in $G$. The effective resistance between a pair of vertices is a physics-motivated quantity that encapsulates both the congestion and the dilation of a flow. It is directly related to random walks, and it has been instrumental in the recent works for designing fast algorithms for combinatorial optimization problems, graph sparsification, and net…
In this article, we present the first deterministic directed Laplacian L systems solver that runs in time almost-linear in the number of non-zero entries of L. Previous reductions imply the first deterministic almost-linear time algorithms for computing various fundamental quantities on directed graphs including stationary distributions, personalized PageRank, hitting times and escape probabilities. We obtain these results by introducing partial symmetrization, a new technique that makes the Laplacian of an Eulerian directed graph ``less directed'' in a useful sense, which may be of independen…
