No Arabic abstract
Quicksort algorithm with Hoares partition scheme is traditionally implemented with nested loops. In this article, we present loop programming and refactoring techniques that lead to simplified implementation for Hoares quicksort algorithm consisting of a single loop. We believe that the techniques are beneficial for general programming and may be used for the discovery of more novel algorithms.
The linear pivot selection algorithm, known as median-of-medians, makes the worst case complexity of quicksort be $mathrm{O}(nln n)$. Nevertheless, it has often been said that this algorithm is too expensive to use in quicksort. In this article, we show that we can make the quicksort with this kind of pivot selection approach be efficient.
In this paper, we study the single-source shortest-path (SSSP) problem with positive edge weights, which is a notoriously hard problem in the parallel context. In practice, the $Delta$-stepping algorithm proposed by Meyer and Sanders has been widely adopted. However, $Delta$-stepping has no known worst-case bounds for general graphs. The performance of $Delta$-stepping also highly relies on the parameter $Delta$. There have also been lots of algorithms with theoretical bounds, such as Radius-stepping, but they either have no implementations available or are much slower than $Delta$-stepping in practice. We propose a stepping algorithm framework that generalizes existing algorithms such as $Delta$-stepping and Radius-stepping. The framework allows for similar analysis and implementations of all stepping algorithms. We also propose a new ADT, lazy-batched priority queue (LaB-PQ), that abstracts the semantics of the priority queue needed by the stepping algorithms. We provide two data structures for LaB-PQ, focusing on theoretical and practical efficiency, respectively. Based on the new framework and LaB-PQ, we show two new stepping algorithms, $rho$-stepping and $Delta^*$-stepping, that are simple, with non-trivial worst-case bounds, and fast in practice. The stepping algorithm framework also provides almost identical implementations for three algorithms: Bellman-Ford, $Delta^*$-stepping, and $rho$-stepping. We compare our code with four state-of-the-art implementations. On five social and web graphs, $rho$-stepping is 1.3--2.5x faster than all the existing implementations. On two road graphs, our $Delta^*$-stepping is at least 14% faster than existing implementations, while $rho$-stepping is also competitive. The almost identical implementations for stepping algorithms also allow for in-depth analyses and comparisons among the stepping algorithms in practice.
We show a new way to round vector solutions of semidefinite programming (SDP) hierarchies into integral solutions, based on a connection between these hierarchies and the spectrum of the input graph. We demonstrate the utility of our method by providing a new SDP-hierarchy based algorithm for constraint satisfaction problems with 2-variable constraints (2-CSPs). More concretely, we show for every 2-CSP instance I a rounding algorithm for r rounds of the Lasserre SDP hierarchy for I that obtains an integral solution that is at most eps worse than the relaxations value (normalized to lie in [0,1]), as long as r > kcdotrank_{geq theta}(Ins)/poly(e) ;, where k is the alphabet size of I, $theta=poly(e/k)$, and $rank_{geq theta}(Ins)$ denotes the number of eigenvalues larger than $theta$ in the normalized adjacency matrix of the constraint graph of $Ins$. In the case that $Ins$ is a uniquegames instance, the threshold $theta$ is only a polynomial in $e$, and is independent of the alphabet size. Also in this case, we can give a non-trivial bound on the number of rounds for emph{every} instance. In particular our result yields an SDP-hierarchy based algorithm that matches the performance of the recent subexponential algorithm of Arora, Barak and Steurer (FOCS 2010) in the worst case, but runs faster on a natural family of instances, thus further restricting the set of possible hard instances for Khots Unique Games Conjecture. Our algorithm actually requires less than the $n^{O(r)}$ constraints specified by the $r^{th}$ level of the Lasserre hierarchy, and in some cases $r$ rounds of our program can be evaluated in time $2^{O(r)}poly(n)$.
The celebrated multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory models the basic trade-off between exploration, or learning about the state of a system, and exploitation, or utilizing the system. In this paper we study the variant of the multi-armed bandit problem where the exploration phase involves costly experiments and occurs before the exploitation phase; and where each play of an arm during the exploration phase updates a prior belief about the arm. The problem of finding an inexpensive exploration strategy to optimize a certain exploitation objective is NP-Hard even when a single play reveals all information about an arm, and all exploration steps cost the same. We provide the first polynomial time constant-factor approximation algorithm for this class of problems. We show that this framework also generalizes several problems of interest studied in the context of data acquisition in sensor networks. Our analyses also extends to switching and setup costs, and to concave utility objectives. Our solution approach is via a novel linear program rounding technique based on stochastic packing. In addition to yielding exploration policies whose performance is within a small constant factor of the adaptive optimal policy, a nice feature of this approach is that the resulting policies explore the arms sequentially without revisiting any arm. Sequentiality is a well-studied concept in decision theory, and is very desirable in domains where multiple explorations can be conducted in parallel, for instance, in the sensor network context.
We propose a new hierarchy of semidefinite programming relaxations for inference problems. As test cases, we consider the problem of community detection in block models. The vertices are partitioned into $k$ communities, and a graph is sampled conditional on a prescribed number of inter- and intra-community edges. The problem of detection, where we are to decide with high probability whether a graph was drawn from this model or the uniform distribution on regular graphs, is conjectured to undergo a computational phase transition at a point called the Kesten-Stigum (KS) threshold. In this work, we consider two models of random graphs namely the well-studied (irregular) stochastic block model and a distribution over random regular graphs well call the Degree Regular Block Model. For both these models, we show that sufficiently high constant levels of our hierarchy can perform detection arbitrarily close to the KS threshold and that our algorithm is robust to up to a linear number of adversarial edge perturbations. Furthermore, in the case of Degree Regular Block Model (DRBM), we show that below the Kesten-Stigum threshold no constant level can do so. In the case of the (irregular) Stochastic Block Model, it is known that efficient algorithms exist all the way down to this threshold, although none are robust to a linear number of adversarial perturbations of the graph when the average degree is small. More importantly, there is little complexity-theoretic evidence that detection is hard below the threshold. In the DRBM with more than two groups, it has not to our knowledge been proven that any algorithm succeeds down to the KS threshold, let alone that one can do so robustly, and there is a similar dearth of evidence for hardness below this point.