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Register a new userSpectral Algorithms for Unique Games
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Alexandra Kolla
Publication date
2011
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Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Alexandra Kolla
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We give a new algorithm for Unique Games which is based on purely {em spectral} techniques, in contrast to previous work in the area, which relies heavily on semidefinite programming (SDP). Given a highly satisfiable instance of Unique Games, our algorithm is able to recover a good assignment. The approximation guarantee depends only on the completeness of the game, and not on the alphabet size, while the running time depends on spectral properties of the {em Label-Extended} graph associated with the instance of Unique Games. We further show that on input the integrality gap instance of Khot and Vishnoi, our algorithm runs in quasi-polynomial time and decides that the instance if highly unsatisfiable. Notably, when run on this instance, the standard SDP relaxation of Unique Games {em fails}. As a special case, we also re-derive a polynomial time algorithm for Unique Games on expander constraint graphs. The main ingredient of our algorithm is a technique to effectively use the full spectrum of the underlying graph instead of just the second eigenvalue, which is of independent interest. The question of how to take advantage of the full spectrum of a graph in the design of algorithms has been often studied, but no significant progress was made prior to this work.
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These are the lecture notes for the DIMACS Tutorial Limits of Approximation Algorithms: PCPs and Unique Games held at the DIMACS Center, CoRE Building, Rutgers University on 20-21 July, 2009. This tutorial was jointly sponsored by the DIMACS Special Focus on Hardness of Approximation, the DIMACS Special Focus on Algorithmic Foundations of the Internet, and the Center for Computational Intractability with support from the National Security Agency and the National Science Foundation. The speakers at the tutorial were Matthew Andrews, Sanjeev Arora, Moses Charikar, Prahladh Harsha, Subhash Khot, Dana Moshkovitz and Lisa Zhang. The sribes were Ashkan Aazami, Dev Desai, Igor Gorodezky, Geetha Jagannathan, Alexander S. Kulikov, Darakhshan J. Mir, Alantha Newman, Aleksandar Nikolov, David Pritchard and Gwen Spencer.
We study the problem of approximating the value of a Unique Game instance in the streaming model. A simple count of the number of constraints divided by $p$, the alphabet size of the Unique Game, gives a trivial $p$-approximation that can be computed in $O(log n)$ space. Meanwhile, with high probability, a sample of $tilde{O}(n)$ constraints suffices to estimate the optimal value to $(1+epsilon)$ accuracy. We prove that any single-pass streaming algorithm that achieves a $(p-epsilon)$-approximation requires $Omega_epsilon(sqrt{n})$ space. Our proof is via a reduction from lower bounds for a communication problem that is a $p$-ary variant of the Boolean Hidden Matching problem studied in the literature. Given the utility of Unique Games as a starting point for reduction to other optimization problems, our strong hardness for approximating Unique Games could lead to downemph{stream} hardness results for streaming approximability for other CSP-like problems.
Covering spaces of graphs have long been useful for studying expanders (as graph lifts) and unique games (as the label-extended graph). In this paper we advocate for the thesis that there is a much deeper relationship between computational topology and the Unique Games Conjecture. Our starting point is Linials 2005 observation that the only known problems whose inapproximability is equivalent to the Unique Games Conjecture - Unique Games and Max-2Lin - are instances of Maximum Section of a Covering Space on graphs. We then observe that the reduction between these two problems (Khot-Kindler-Mossel-ODonnell, FOCS 2004; SICOMP, 2007) gives a well-defined map of covering spaces. We further prove that inapproximability for Maximum Section of a Covering Space on (cell decompositions of) closed 2-manifolds is also equivalent to the Unique Games Conjecture. This gives the first new Unique Games-complete problem in over a decade. Our results partially settle an open question of Chen and Freedman (SODA 2010; Disc. Comput. Geom., 2011) from computational topology, by showing that their question is almost equivalent to the Unique Games Conjecture. (The main difference is that they ask for inapproximability over $mathbb{Z}/2mathbb{Z}$, and we show Unique Games-completeness over $mathbb{Z}/kmathbb{Z}$ for large $k$.) This equivalence comes from the fact that when the structure group $G$ of the covering space is Abelian - or more generally for principal $G$-bundles - Maximum Section of a $G$-Covering Space is the same as the well-studied problem of 1-Homology Localization. Although our most technically demanding result is an application of Unique Games to computational topology, we hope that our observations on the topological nature of the Unique Games Conjecture will lead to applications of algebraic topology to the Unique Games Conjecture in the future.
Higher order random walks (HD-walks) on high dimensional expanders (HDX) have seen an incredible amount of study and application since their introduction by Kaufman and Mass [KM16], yet their broader combinatorial and spectral properties remain poorly understood. We develop a combinatorial characterization of the spectral structure of HD-walks on two-sided local-spectral expanders [DK17], which offer a broad generalization of the well-studied Johnson and Grassmann graphs. Our characterization, which shows that the spectra of HD-walks lie tightly concentrated in a few combinatorially structured strips, leads to novel structural theorems such as a tight $ell_2$-characterization of edge-expansion, as well as to a new understanding of local-to-global algorithms on HDX. Towards the latter, we introduce a spectral complexity measure called Stripped Threshold Rank, and show how it can replace the (much larger) threshold rank in controlling the performance of algorithms on structured objects. Combined with a sum-of-squares proof of the former $ell_2$-characterization, we give a concrete application of this framework to algorithms for unique games on HD-walks, in many cases improving the state of the art [RBS11, ABS15] from nearly-exponential to polynomial time (e.g. for sparsifications of Johnson graphs or of slices of the $q$-ary hypercube). Our characterization of expansion also holds an interesting connection to hardness of approximation, where an $ell_infty$-variant for the Grassmann graphs was recently used to resolve the 2-2 Games Conjecture [KMS18]. We give a reduction from a related $ell_infty$-variant to our $ell_2$-characterization, but it loses factors in the regime of interest for hardness where the gap between $ell_2$ and $ell_infty$ structure is large. Nevertheless, we open the door for further work on the use of HDX in hardness of approximation and unique games.
We give an algorithm for solving unique games (UG) instances whenever low-degree sum-of-squares proofs certify good bounds on the small-set-expansion of the underlying constraint graph via a hypercontractive inequality. Our algorithm is in fact more versatile, and succeeds even when the constraint graph is not a small-set expander as long as the structure of non-expanding small sets is (informally speaking) characterized by a low-degree sum-of-squares proof. Our results are obtained by rounding emph{low-entropy} solutions -- measured via a new global potential function -- to sum-of-squares (SoS) semidefinite programs. This technique adds to the (currently short) list of general tools for analyzing SoS relaxations for emph{worst-case} optimization problems. As corollaries, we obtain the first polynomial-time algorithms for solving any UG instance where the constraint graph is either the emph{noisy hypercube}, the emph{short code} or the emph{Johnson} graph. The prior best algorithm for such instances was the eigenvalue enumeration algorithm of Arora, Barak, and Steurer (2010) which requires quasi-polynomial time for the noisy hypercube and nearly-exponential time for the short code and Johnson graphs. All of our results achieve an approximation of $1-epsilon$ vs $delta$ for UG instances, where $epsilon>0$ and $delta > 0$ depend on the expansion parameters of the graph but are independent of the alphabet size.
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