No Arabic abstract
Maximal independent set (MIS), maximal matching (MM), and $(Delta+1)$-coloring in graphs of maximum degree $Delta$ are among the most prominent algorithmic graph theory problems. They are all solvable by a simple linear-time greedy algorithm and up until very recently this constituted the state-of-the-art. In SODA 2019, Assadi, Chen, and Khanna gave a randomized algorithm for $(Delta+1)$-coloring that runs in $widetilde{O}(nsqrt{n})$ time, which even for moderately dense graphs is sublinear in the input size. The work of Assadi et al. however contained a spoiler for MIS and MM: neither problems provably admits a sublinear-time algorithm in general graphs. In this work, we dig deeper into the possibility of achieving sublinear-time algorithms for MIS and MM. The neighborhood independence number of a graph $G$, denoted by $beta(G)$, is the size of the largest independent set in the neighborhood of any vertex. We identify $beta(G)$ as the ``right parameter to measure the runtime of MIS and MM algorithms: Although graphs of bounded neighborhood independence may be very dense (clique is one example), we prove that carefully chosen variants of greedy algorithms for MIS and MM run in $O(nbeta(G))$ and $O(nlog{n}cdotbeta(G))$ time respectively on any $n$-vertex graph $G$. We complement this positive result by observing that a simple extension of the lower bound of Assadi et.al. implies that $Omega(nbeta(G))$ time is also necessary for any algorithm to either problem for all values of $beta(G)$ from $1$ to $Theta(n)$. We note that our algorithm for MIS is deterministic while for MM we use randomization which we prove is unavoidable: any deterministic algorithm for MM requires $Omega(n^2)$ time even for $beta(G) = 2$.
Maintaining maximal independent set in dynamic graph is a fundamental open problem in graph theory and the first sublinear time deterministic algorithm was came up by Assadi, Onak, Schieber and Solomon(STOC18), which achieves $O(m^{3/4})$ amortized update time. We have two main contributions in this paper. We present a new simple deterministic algorithm with $O(m^{2/3}sqrt{log m})$ amortized update time, which improves the previous best result. And we also present the first randomized algorithm with expected $O(sqrt{m}log^{1.5}m)$ amortized time against an oblivious adversary.
We present the first algorithm for maintaining a maximal independent set (MIS) of a fully dynamic graph---which undergoes both edge insertions and deletions---in polylogarithmic time. Our algorithm is randomized and, per update, takes $O(log^2 Delta cdot log^2 n)$ expected time. Furthermore, the algorithm can be adjusted to have $O(log^2 Delta cdot log^4 n)$ worst-case update-time with high probability. Here, $n$ denotes the number of vertices and $Delta$ is the maximum degree in the graph. The MIS problem in fully dynamic graphs has attracted significant attention after a breakthrough result of Assadi, Onak, Schieber, and Solomon [STOC18] who presented an algorithm with $O(m^{3/4})$ update-time (and thus broke the natural $Omega(m)$ barrier) where $m$ denotes the number of edges in the graph. This result was improved in a series of subsequent papers, though, the update-time remained polynomial. In particular, the fastest algorithm prior to our work had $widetilde{O}(min{sqrt{n}, m^{1/3}})$ update-time [Assadi et al. SODA19]. Our algorithm maintains the lexicographically first MIS over a random order of the vertices. As a result, the same algorithm also maintains a 3-approximation of correlation clustering. We also show that a simpler variant of our algorithm can be used to maintain a random-order lexicographically first maximal matching in the same update-time.
We present a near-tight analysis of the average query complexity -- `a la Nguyen and Onak [FOCS08] -- of the randomized greedy maximal matching algorithm, improving over the bound of Yoshida, Yamamoto and Ito [STOC09]. For any $n$-vertex graph of average degree $bar{d}$, this leads to the following sublinear-time algorithms for estimating the size of maximum matching and minimum vertex cover, all of which are provably time-optimal up to logarithmic factors: $bullet$ A multiplicative $(2+epsilon)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}(n/epsilon^2)$ time using adjacency list queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(n)$ time lower bound for any multiplicative approximation and is, notably, the first $O(1)$-approximation that runs in $o(n^{1.5})$ time. $bullet$ A $(2, epsilon n)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}((bar{d} + 1)/epsilon^2)$ time using adjacency list queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(bar{d}+1)$ lower bound of Parnas and Ron [TCS07] which holds for any $(O(1), epsilon n)$-approximation, and improves over the bounds of [Yoshida et al. STOC09; Onak et al. SODA12] and [Kapralov et al. SODA20]: The former two take at least quadratic time in the degree which can be as large as $Omega(n^2)$ and the latter obtains a much larger approximation. $bullet$ A $(2, epsilon n)$-approximation in $widetilde{O}(n/epsilon^3)$ time using adjacency matrix queries. This (nearly) matches an $Omega(n)$ time lower bound in this model and improves over the $widetilde{O}(nsqrt{n})$-time $(2, epsilon n)$-approximate algorithm of [Chen, Kannan, and Khanna ICALP20]. It also turns out that any non-trivial multiplicative approximation in the adjacency matrix model requires $Omega(n^2)$ time, so the additive $epsilon n$ error is necessary too. As immediate corollaries, we get improved sublinear time estimators for (variants of) TSP and an improved AMPC algorithm for maximal matching.
The study of approximate matching in the Massively Parallel Computations (MPC) model has recently seen a burst of breakthroughs. Despite this progress, however, we still have a far more limited understanding of maximal matching which is one of the central problems of parallel and distributed computing. All known MPC algorithms for maximal matching either take polylogarithmic time which is considered inefficient, or require a strictly super-linear space of $n^{1+Omega(1)}$ per machine. In this work, we close this gap by providing a novel analysis of an extremely simple algorithm a variant of which was conjectured to work by Czumaj et al. [STOC18]. The algorithm edge-samples the graph, randomly partitions the vertices, and finds a random greedy maximal matching within each partition. We show that this algorithm drastically reduces the vertex degrees. This, among some other results, leads to an $O(log log Delta)$ round algorithm for maximal matching with $O(n)$ space (or even mildly sublinear in $n$ using standard techniques). As an immediate corollary, we get a $2$ approximate minimum vertex cover in essentially the same rounds and space. This is the best possible approximation factor under standard assumptions, culminating a long line of research. It also leads to an improved $O(loglog Delta)$ round algorithm for $1 + varepsilon$ approximate matching. All these results can also be implemented in the congested clique model within the same number of rounds.
In the compressive phase retrieval problem, or phaseless compressed sensing, or compressed sensing from intensity only measurements, the goal is to reconstruct a sparse or approximately $k$-sparse vector $x in mathbb{R}^n$ given access to $y= |Phi x|$, where $|v|$ denotes the vector obtained from taking the absolute value of $vinmathbb{R}^n$ coordinate-wise. In this paper we present sublinear-time algorithms for different variants of the compressive phase retrieval problem which are akin to the variants considered for the classical compressive sensing problem in theoretical computer science. Our algorithms use pure combinatorial techniques and near-optimal number of measurements.