ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
Recently Ermon et al. (2013) pioneered a way to practically compute approximations to large scale counting or discrete integration problems by using random hashes. The hashes are used to reduce the counting problem into many separate discrete optimization problems. The optimization problems then can be solved by an NP-oracle such as commercial SAT solvers or integer linear programming (ILP) solvers. In particular, Ermon et al. showed that if the domain of integration is ${0,1}^n$ then it is possible to obtain a solution within a factor of $16$ of the optimal (a 16-approximation) by this technique. In many crucial counting tasks, such as computation of partition function of ferromagnetic Potts model, the domain of integration is naturally ${0,1,dots, q-1}^n, q>2$, the hypergrid. The straightforward extension of Ermon et al.s method allows a $q^2$-approximation for this problem. For large values of $q$, this is undesirable. In this paper, we show an improved technique to obtain an approximation factor of $4+O(1/q^2)$ to this problem. We are able to achieve this by using an idea of optimization over multiple bins of the hash functions, that can be easily implemented by inequality constraints, or even in unconstrained way. Also the burden on the NP-oracle is not increased by our method (an ILP solver can still be used). We provide experimental simulation results to support the theoretical guarantees of our algorithms.
Cut problems form one of the most fundamental classes of problems in algorithmic graph theory. For instance, the minimum cut, the minimum $s$-$t$ cut, the minimum multiway cut, and the minimum $k$-way cut are some of the commonly encountered cut prob
Learning in the presence of outliers is a fundamental problem in statistics. Until recently, all known efficient unsupervised learning algorithms were very sensitive to outliers in high dimensions. In particular, even for the task of robust mean esti
We consider the problem of approximately solving constraint satisfaction problems with arity $k > 2$ ($k$-CSPs) on instances satisfying certain expansion properties, when viewed as hypergraphs. Random instances of $k$-CSPs, which are also highly expa
Estimation is the computational task of recovering a hidden parameter $x$ associated with a distribution $D_x$, given a measurement $y$ sampled from the distribution. High dimensional estimation problems arise naturally in statistics, machine learnin
There has been a resurgence of interest in lower bounds whose truth rests on the conjectured hardness of well known computational problems. These conditional lower bounds have become important and popular due to the painfully slow progress on proving