No Arabic abstract
Matching is one of the most fundamental and broadly applicable problems across many domains. In these diverse real-world applications, there is often a degree of uncertainty in the input which has led to the study of stochastic matching models. Here, each edge in the graph has a known, independent probability of existing derived from some prediction. Algorithms must probe edges to determine existence and match them irrevocably if they exist. Further, each vertex may have a patience constraint denoting how many of its neighboring edges can be probed. We present new ordered contention resolution schemes yielding improved approximation guarantees for some of the foundational problems studied in this area. For stochastic matching with patience constraints in general graphs, we provide a 0.382-approximate algorithm, significantly improving over the previous best 0.31-approximation of Baveja et al. (2018). When the vertices do not have patience constraints, we describe a 0.432-approximate random order probing algorithm with several corollaries such as an improved guarantee for the Prophet Secretary problem under Edge Arrivals. Finally, for the special case of bipartite graphs with unit patience constraints on one of the partitions, we show a 0.632-approximate algorithm that improves on the recent $1/3$-guarantee of Hikima et al. (2021).
We consider the online stochastic matching problem proposed by Feldman et al. [FMMM09] as a model of display ad allocation. We are given a bipartite graph; one side of the graph corresponds to a fixed set of bins and the other side represents the set of possible ball types. At each time step, a ball is sampled independently from the given distribution and it needs to be matched upon its arrival to an empty bin. The goal is to maximize the number of allocations. We present an online algorithm for this problem with a competitive ratio of 0.702. Before our result, algorithms with a competitive ratio better than $1-1/e$ were known under the assumption that the expected number of arriving balls of each type is integral. A key idea of the algorithm is to collect statistics about the decisions of the optimum offline solution using Monte Carlo sampling and use those statistics to guide the decisions of the online algorithm. We also show that our algorithm achieves a competitive ratio of 0.705 when the rates are integral. On the hardness side, we prove that no online algorithm can have a competitive ratio better than 0.823 under the known distribution model (and henceforth under the permutation model). This improves upon the 5/6 hardness result proved by Goel and Mehta cite{GM08} for the permutation model.
We give a 1.488-approximation for the classic scheduling problem of minimizing total weighted completion time on unrelated machines. This is a considerable improvement on the recent breakthrough of $(1.5 - 10^{-7})$-approximation (STOC 2016, Bansal-Srinivasan-Svensson) and the follow-up result of $(1.5 - 1/6000)$-approximation (FOCS 2017, Li). Bansal et al. introduced a novel rounding scheme yielding strong negative correlations for the first time and applied it to the scheduling problem to obtain their breakthrough, which resolved the open problem if one can beat out the long-standing $1.5$-approximation barrier based on independent rounding. Our key technical contribution is in achieving significantly stronger negative correlations via iterative fair contention resolution, which is of independent interest. Previously, Bansal et al. obtained strong negative correlations via a variant of pipage type rounding and Li used it as a black box.
This paper focuses on the contention resolution problem on a shared communication channel that does not support collision detection. A shared communication channel is a multiple access channel, which consists of a sequence of synchronized time slots. Players on the channel may attempt to broadcast a packet (message) in any time slot. A players broadcast succeeds if no other player broadcasts during that slot. If two or more players broadcast in the same time slot, then the broadcasts collide and both broadcasts fail. The lack of collision detection means that a player monitoring the channel cannot differentiate between the case of two or more players broadcasting in the same slot (a collision) and zero players broadcasting. In the contention-resolution problem, players arrive on the channel over time, and each player has one packet to transmit. The goal is to coordinate the players so that each player is able to successfully transmit its packet within reasonable time. However, the players can only communicate via the shared channel by choosing to either broadcast or not. A contention-resolution protocol is measured in terms of its throughput (channel utilization). Previous work on contention resolution that achieved constant throughput assumed that either players could detect collisions, or the players arrival pattern is generated by a memoryless (non-adversarial) process. The foundational question answered by this paper is whether collision detection is a luxury or necessity when the objective is to achieve constant throughput. We show that even without collision detection, one can solve contention resolution, achieving constant throughput, with high probability.
We consider the following stochastic matching problem on both weighted and unweighted graphs: A graph $G(V, E)$ along with a parameter $p in (0, 1)$ is given in the input. Each edge of $G$ is realized independently with probability $p$. The goal is to select a degree bounded (dependent only on $p$) subgraph $H$ of $G$ such that the expected size/weight of maximum realized matching of $H$ is close to that of $G$. This model of stochastic matching has attracted significant attention over the recent years due to its various applications. The most fundamental open question is the best approximation factor achievable for such algorithms that, in the literature, are referred to as non-adaptive algorithms. Prior work has identified breaking (near) half-approximation as a barrier for both weighted and unweighted graphs. Our main results are as follows: -- We analyze a simple and clean algorithm and show that for unweighted graphs, it finds an (almost) $4sqrt{2}-5$ ($approx 0.6568$) approximation by querying $O(frac{log (1/p)}{p})$ edges per vertex. This improves over the state-of-the-art $0.5001$ approximate algorithm of Assadi et al. [EC17]. -- We show that the same algorithm achieves a $0.501$ approximation for weighted graphs by querying $O(frac{log (1/p)}{p})$ edges per vertex. This is the first algorithm to break $0.5$ approximation barrier for weighted graphs. It also improves the per-vertex queries of the state-of-the-art by Yamaguchi and Maehara [SODA18] and Behnezhad and Reyhani [EC18]. Our algorithms are fundamentally different from prior works, yet are very simple and natural. For the analysis, we introduce a number of procedures that construct heavy fractional matchings. We consider the new algorithms and our analytical tools to be the main contributions of this paper.
Let $P$ be a set (called points), $Q$ be a set (called queries) and a function $ f:Ptimes Qto [0,infty)$ (called cost). For an error parameter $epsilon>0$, a set $Ssubseteq P$ with a emph{weight function} $w:P rightarrow [0,infty)$ is an $epsilon$-coreset if $sum_{sin S}w(s) f(s,q)$ approximates $sum_{pin P} f(p,q)$ up to a multiplicative factor of $1pmepsilon$ for every given query $qin Q$. We construct coresets for the $k$-means clustering of $n$ input points, both in an arbitrary metric space and $d$-dimensional Euclidean space. For Euclidean space, we present the first coreset whose size is simultaneously independent of both $d$ and $n$. In particular, this is the first coreset of size $o(n)$ for a stream of $n$ sparse points in a $d ge n$ dimensional space (e.g. adjacency matrices of graphs). We also provide the first generalizations of such coresets for handling outliers. For arbitrary metric spaces, we improve the dependence on $k$ to $k log k$ and present a matching lower bound. For $M$-estimator clustering (special cases include the well-known $k$-median and $k$-means clustering), we introduce a new technique for converting an offline coreset construction to the streaming setting. Our method yields streaming coreset algorithms requiring the storage of $O(S + k log n)$ points, where $S$ is the size of the offline coreset. In comparison, the previous state-of-the-art was the merge-and-reduce technique that required $O(S log^{2a+1} n)$ points, where $a$ is the exponent in the offline constructions dependence on $epsilon^{-1}$. For example, combining our offline and streaming results, we produce a streaming metric $k$-means coreset algorithm using $O(epsilon^{-2} k log k log n)$ points of storage. The previous state-of-the-art required $O(epsilon^{-4} k log k log^{6} n)$ points.