No Arabic abstract
A tessellation of a graph is a partition of its vertices into vertex disjoint cliques. A tessellation cover of a graph is a set of tessellations that covers all of its edges. The $t$-tessellability problem aims to decide whether there is a tessellation cover of the graph with $t$ tessellations. This problem is motivated by its applications to quantum walk models, in especial, the evolution operator of the staggered model is obtained from a graph tessellation cover. We establish upper bounds on the tessellation cover number given by the minimum between the chromatic index of the graph and the chromatic number of its clique graph and we show graph classes for which these bounds are tight. We prove $mathcal{NP}$-completeness for $t$-tessellability if the instance is restricted to planar graphs, chordal (2,1)-graphs, (1,2)-graphs, diamond-free graphs with diameter five, or for any fixed $t$ at least 3. On the other hand, we improve the complexity for 2-tessellability to a linear-time algorithm.
Quantum walks have received a great deal of attention recently because they can be used to develop new quantum algorithms and to simulate interesting quantum systems. In this work, we focus on a model called staggered quantum walk, which employs advanced ideas of graph theory and has the advantage of including the most important instances of other discrete-time models. The evolution operator of the staggered model is obtained from a tessellation cover, which is defined in terms of a set of partitions of the graph into cliques. It is important to establish the minimum number of tessellations required in a tessellation cover, and what classes of graphs admit a small number of tessellations. We describe two main results: (1) infinite classes of graphs where we relate the chromatic number of the clique graph to the minimum number of tessellations required in a tessellation cover, and (2) the problem of deciding whether a graph is $k$-tessellable for $kge 3$ is NP-complete.
A cactus graph is a graph in which any two cycles are edge-disjoint. We present a constructive proof of the fact that any plane graph $G$ contains a cactus subgraph $C$ where $C$ contains at least a $frac{1}{6}$ fraction of the triangular faces of $G$. We also show that this ratio cannot be improved by showing a tight lower bound. Together with an algorithm for linear matroid parity, our bound implies two approximation algorithms for computing dense planar structures inside any graph: (i) A $frac{1}{6}$ approximation algorithm for, given any graph $G$, finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of triangular faces; this improves upon the previous $frac{1}{11}$-approximation; (ii) An alternate (and arguably more illustrative) proof of the $frac{4}{9}$ approximation algorithm for finding a planar subgraph with a maximum number of edges. Our bound is obtained by analyzing a natural local search strategy and heavily exploiting the exchange arguments. Therefore, this suggests the power of local search in handling problems of this kind.
We study the problem of high-dimensional linear regression in a robust model where an $epsilon$-fraction of the samples can be adversarially corrupted. We focus on the fundamental setting where the covariates of the uncorrupted samples are drawn from a Gaussian distribution $mathcal{N}(0, Sigma)$ on $mathbb{R}^d$. We give nearly tight upper bounds and computational lower bounds for this problem. Specifically, our main contributions are as follows: For the case that the covariance matrix is known to be the identity, we give a sample near-optimal and computationally efficient algorithm that outputs a candidate hypothesis vector $widehat{beta}$ which approximates the unknown regression vector $beta$ within $ell_2$-norm $O(epsilon log(1/epsilon) sigma)$, where $sigma$ is the standard deviation of the random observation noise. An error of $Omega (epsilon sigma)$ is information-theoretically necessary, even with infinite sample size. Prior work gave an algorithm for this problem with sample complexity $tilde{Omega}(d^2/epsilon^2)$ whose error guarantee scales with the $ell_2$-norm of $beta$. For the case of unknown covariance, we show that we can efficiently achieve the same error guarantee as in the known covariance case using an additional $tilde{O}(d^2/epsilon^2)$ unlabeled examples. On the other hand, an error of $O(epsilon sigma)$ can be information-theoretically attained with $O(d/epsilon^2)$ samples. We prove a Statistical Query (SQ) lower bound providing evidence that this quadratic tradeoff in the sample size is inherent. More specifically, we show that any polynomial time SQ learning algorithm for robust linear regression (in Hubers contamination model) with estimation complexity $O(d^{2-c})$, where $c>0$ is an arbitrarily small constant, must incur an error of $Omega(sqrt{epsilon} sigma)$.
Threshold graphs are a class of graphs that have many equivalent definitions and have applications in integer programming and set packing problems. A graph is said to have a threshold cover of size $k$ if its edges can be covered using $k$ threshold graphs. Chvatal and Hammer, in 1977, defined the threshold dimension $mathrm{th}(G)$ of a graph $G$ to be the least integer $k$ such that $G$ has a threshold cover of size $k$ and observed that $mathrm{th}(G)geqchi(G^*)$, where $G^*$ is a suitably constructed auxiliary graph. Raschle and Simon~[Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 95, pages 650--661, 1995] proved that $mathrm{th}(G)=chi(G^*)$ whenever $G^*$ is bipartite. We show how the lexicographic method of Hell and Huang can be used to obtain a completely new and, we believe, simpler proof for this result. For the case when $G$ is a split graph, our method yields a proof that is much shorter than the ones known in the literature.
We establish a polynomial-time approximation algorithm for partition functions of quantum spin models at high temperature. Our algorithm is based on the quantum cluster expansion of Netov{c}ny and Redig and the cluster expansion approach to designing algorithms due to Helmuth, Perkins, and Regts. Similar results have previously been obtained by related methods, and our main contribution is a simple and slightly sharper analysis for the case of pairwise interactions on bounded-degree graphs.