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Register a new userStochastic Control via Entropy Compression
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Added by
Fotis Iliopoulos
Publication date
2016
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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We consider an agent trying to bring a system to an acceptable state by repeated probabilistic action. Several recent works on algorithmizations of the Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL) can be seen as establishing sufficient conditions for the agent to succeed. Here we study whether such stochastic control is also possible in a noisy environment, where both the process of state-observation and the process of state-evolution are subject to adversarial perturbation (noise). The introduction of noise causes the tools developed for LLL algorithmization to break down since the key LLL ingredient, the sparsity of the causality (dependence) relationship, no longer holds. To overcome this challenge we develop a new analysis where entropy plays a central role, both to measure the rate at which progress towards an acceptable state is made and the rate at which noise undoes this progress. The end result is a sufficient condition that allows a smooth tradeoff between the intensity of the noise and the amenability of the system, recovering an asymmetric LLL condition in the noiseless case.
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We develop a framework for the rigorous analysis of focused stochastic local search algorithms. These are algorithms that search a state space by repeatedly selecting some constraint that is violated in the current state and moving to a random nearby state that addresses the violation, while hopefully not introducing many new ones. An important class of focused local search algorithms with provable performance guarantees has recently arisen from algorithmizations of the Lov{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL), a non-constructive tool for proving the existence of satisfying states by introducing a background measure on the state space. While powerful, the state transitions of algorithms in this class must be, in a precise sense, perfectly compatible with the background measure. In many applications this is a very restrictive requirement and one needs to step outside the class. Here we introduce the notion of emph{measure distortion} and develop a framework for analyzing arbitrary focused stochastic local search algorithms, recovering LLL algorithmizations as the special case of no distortion. Our framework takes as input an arbitrary such algorithm and an arbitrary probability measure and shows how to use the measure as a yardstick of algorithmic progress, even for algorithms designed independently of the measure.
We develop tools for analyzing focused stochastic local search algorithms. These are algorithms which search a state space probabilistically by repeatedly selecting a constraint that is violated in the current state and moving to a random nearby state which, hopefully, addresses the violation without introducing many new ones. A large class of such algorithms arise from the algorithmization of the Lovasz Local Lemma, a non-constructive tool for proving the existence of satisfying states. Here we give tools that provide a unified analysis of such algorithms and of many more, expressing them as instances of a general framework.
In this note, we prove a tight lower bound on the joint entropy of $n$ unbiased Bernoulli random variables which are $n/2$-wise independent. For general $k$-wise independence, we give new lower bounds by adapting Navon and Samorodnitskys Fourier proof of the `LP bound on error correcting codes. This counts as partial progress on a problem asked by Gavinsky and Pudlak.
The total influence of a function is a central notion in analysis of Boolean functions, and characterizing functions that have small total influence is one of the most fundamental questions associated with it. The KKL theorem and the Friedgut junta theorem give a strong characterization of such functions whenever the bound on the total influence is $o(log n)$. However, both results become useless when the total influence of the function is $omega(log n)$. The only case in which this logarithmic barrier has been broken for an interesting class of functions was proved by Bourgain and Kalai, who focused on functions that are symmetric under large enough subgroups of $S_n$. In this paper, we build and improve on the techniques of the Bourgain-Kalai paper and establish new concentration results on the Fourier spectrum of Boolean functions with small total influence. Our results include: 1. A quantitative improvement of the Bourgain--Kalai result regarding the total influence of functions that are transitively symmetric. 2. A slightly weaker version of the Fourier--Entropy Conjecture of Friedgut and Kalai. This weaker version implies in particular that the Fourier spectrum of a constant variance, Boolean function $f$ is concentrated on $2^{O(I[f]log I[f])}$ characters, improving an earlier result of Friedgut. Removing the $log I[f]$ factor would essentially resolve the Fourier--Entropy Conjecture, as well as settle a conjecture of Mansour regarding the Fourier spectrum of polynomial size DNF formulas. Our concentration result has new implications in learning theory: it implies that the class of functions whose total influence is at most $K$ is agnostically learnable in time $2^{O(Klog K)}$, using membership queries.
We apply the power-of-two-choices paradigm to a random walk on a graph: rather than moving to a uniform random neighbour at each step, a controller is allowed to choose from two independent uniform random neighbours. We prove that this allows the controller to significantly accelerate the hitting and cover times in several natural graph classes. In particular, we show that the cover time becomes linear in the number $n$ of vertices on discrete tori and bounded degree trees, of order $mathcal{O}(n log log n)$ on bounded degree expanders, and of order $mathcal{O}(n (log log n)^2)$ on the ErdH{o}s-R{e}nyi random graph in a certain sparsely connected regime. We also consider the algorithmic question of computing an optimal strategy, and prove a dichotomy in efficiency between computing strategies for hitting and cover times.
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