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We consider the following basic problem: given an $n$-variate degree-$d$ homogeneous polynomial $f$ with real coefficients, compute a unit vector $x in mathbb{R}^n$ that maximizes $|f(x)|$. Besides its fundamental nature, this problem arises in diverse contexts ranging from tensor and operator norms to graph expansion to quantum information theory. The homogeneous degree $2$ case is efficiently solvable as it corresponds to computing the spectral norm of an associated matrix, but the higher degree case is NP-hard. We give approximation algorithms for this problem that offer a trade-off between the approximation ratio and running time: in $n^{O(q)}$ time, we get an approximation within factor $O_d((n/q)^{d/2-1})$ for arbitrary polynomials, $O_d((n/q)^{d/4-1/2})$ for polynomials with non-negative coefficients, and $O_d(sqrt{m/q})$ for sparse polynomials with $m$ monomials. The approximation guarantees are with respect to the optimum of the level-$q$ sum-of-squares (SoS) SDP relaxation of the problem. Known polynomial time algorithms for this problem rely on decoupling lemmas. Such tools are not capable of offering a trade-off like our results as they blow up the number of variables by a factor equal to the degree. We develop new decoupling tools that are more efficient in the number of variables at the expense of less structure in the output polynomials. This enables us to harness the benefits of higher level SoS relaxations. We complement our algorithmic results with some polynomially large integrality gaps, albeit for a slightly weaker (but still very natural) relaxation. Toward this, we give a method to lift a level-$4$ solution matrix $M$ to a higher level solution, under a mild technical condition on $M$.
Cardinality constrained submodular function maximization, which aims to select a subset of size at most $k$ to maximize a monotone submodular utility function, is the key in many data mining and machine learning applications such as data summarization and maximum coverage problems. When data is given as a stream, streaming submodular optimization (SSO) techniques are desired. Existing SSO techniques can only apply to insertion-only streams where each element has an infinite lifespan, and sliding-window streams where each element has a same lifespan (i.e., window size). However, elements in some data streams may have arbitrary different lifespans, and this requires addressing SSO over streams with inhomogeneous-decays (SSO-ID). This work formulates the SSO-ID problem and presents three algorithms: BasicStreaming is a basic streaming algorithm that achieves an $(1/2-epsilon)$ approximation factor; HistApprox improves the efficiency significantly and achieves an $(1/3-epsilon)$ approximation factor; HistStreaming is a streaming version of HistApprox and uses heuristics to further improve the efficiency. Experiments conducted on real data demonstrate that HistStreaming can find high quality solutions and is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the naive Greedy algorithm.
This work studies the problem of maximizing a higher degree real homogeneous multivariate polynomial over the unit sphere. This problem is equivalent to finding the leading eigenvalue of the associated symmetric tensor of higher order, which is nonconvex and NP-hard. Recent advances show that semidefinite relaxation is quite effective to find a global solution. However, the solution methods involve full/partial eigenvalue decomposition during the iterates, which heavily limits its efficiency and scalability. On the other hand, for odd degree (odd order) cases, the order has to be increased to even, which potentially reduces the efficiency. To find the global solutions, instead of convexifying the problem, we equivalently reformulate the problem as a nonconvex matrix program based on an equivalence property between symmetric rank-1 tensors and matrices of any order, which is a generalization of the existing results. The program is directly solved by a vanilla alternating direction method, which only involves the computation of leading eigenvalue/singular value of certain matrices, benefiting from the special structure of the program. Although being nonconvex, under certain hypotheses, it is proved that the algorithm converges to a leading eigenvalue of the associated tensor. Numerical experiments on different classes of tensors demonstrate that the proposed approach has a significant improvement in efficiency and scalability, while it can keep the effectiveness of semidefinite relaxation as much as possible. For instance, the proposed method finds the leading eigenpair of a third-order 500 dimensional Hilbert tensor in a personal computer within 100 seconds.
We study the first-order convex optimization problem, where we have black-box access to a (not necessarily smooth) function $f:mathbb{R}^n to mathbb{R}$ and its (sub)gradient. Our goal is to find an $epsilon$-approximate minimum of $f$ starting from a point that is distance at most $R$ from the true minimum. If $f$ is $G$-Lipschitz, then the classic gradient descent algorithm solves this problem with $O((GR/epsilon)^{2})$ queries. Importantly, the number of queries is independent of the dimension $n$ and gradient descent is optimal in this regard: No deterministic or randomized algorithm can achieve better complexity that is still independent of the dimension $n$. In this paper we reprove the randomized lower bound of $Omega((GR/epsilon)^{2})$ using a simpler argument than previous lower bounds. We then show that although the function family used in the lower bound is hard for randomized algorithms, it can be solved using $O(GR/epsilon)$ quantum queries. We then show an improved lower bound against quantum algorithms using a different set of instances and establish our main result that in general even quantum algorithms need $Omega((GR/epsilon)^2)$ queries to solve the problem. Hence there is no quantum speedup over gradient descent for black-box first-order convex optimization without further assumptions on the function family.
We study the existence of polynomial kernels, for parameterized problems without a polynomial kernel on general graphs, when restricted to graphs of bounded twin-width. Our main result is that a polynomial kernel for $k$-Dominating Set on graphs of twin-width at most 4 would contradict a standard complexity-theoretic assumption. The reduction is quite involved, especially to get the twin-width upper bound down to 4, and can be tweaked to work for Connected $k$-Dominating Set and Total $k$-Dominating Set (albeit with a worse upper bound on the twin-width). The $k$-Independent Set problem admits the same lower bound by a much simpler argument, previously observed [ICALP 21], which extends to $k$-Independent Dominating Set, $k$-Path, $k$-Induced Path, $k$-Induced Matching, etc. On the positive side, we obtain a simple quadratic vertex kernel for Connected $k$-Vertex Cover and Capacitated $k$-Vertex Cover on graphs of bounded twin-width. Interestingly the kernel applies to graphs of Vapnik-Chervonenkis density 1, and does not require a witness sequence. We also present a more intricate $O(k^{1.5})$ vertex kernel for Connected $k$-Vertex Cover. Finally we show that deciding if a graph has twin-width at most 1 can be done in polynomial time, and observe that most optimization/decision graph problems can be solved in polynomial time on graphs of twin-width at most 1.
We establish sharp estimates that adapt the polynomial method to arbitrary varieties. These include a partitioning theorem, estimates on polynomials vanishing on fixed sets and bounds for the number of connected components of real algebraic varieties. As a first application, we provide a general incidence estimate that is tight in its dependence on the size, degree and dimension of the varieties involved.