skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Tight Bounds for Online Edge Coloring
Vizing’s celebrated theorem asserts that any graph of maximum degree ∆ admits an edge coloring using at most ∆ + 1 colors. In contrast, Bar-Noy, Motwani and Naor showed over a quarter century ago that the trivial greedy algorithm, which uses 2∆−1 colors, is optimal among online algorithms. Their lower bound has a caveat, however: it only applies to lowdegree graphs, with ∆ = O(log n), and they conjectured the existence of online algorithms using ∆(1 + o(1)) colors for ∆ = ω(log n). Progress towards resolving this conjecture was only made under stochastic arrivals (Aggarwal et al., FOCS’03 and Bahmani et al., SODA’10). We resolve the above conjecture for adversarial vertex arrivals in bipartite graphs, for which we present a (1+o(1))∆-edge-coloring algorithm for ∆ = ω(log n) known a priori. Surprisingly, if ∆ is not known ahead of time, we show that no (e/(e−1)−Ω(1))∆-edge-coloring algorithm exists.We then provide an optimal, (e/(e−1) +o(1))∆-edge-coloring algorithm for unknown ∆ = ω(log n). Key to our results, and of possible independent interest, is a novel fractional relaxation for edge coloring, for which we present optimal fractional online algorithms and a near-lossless online rounding scheme, yielding our optimal randomized algorithms.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1814603 1750808 1618280 1527110
PAR ID:
10121531
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Bringmann, Karl; Grohe, Martin; Puppis, Gabriele; Svensson, Ola (Ed.)
    For edge coloring, the online and the W-streaming models seem somewhat orthogonal: the former needs edges to be assigned colors immediately after insertion, typically without any space restrictions, while the latter limits memory to be sublinear in the input size but allows an edge’s color to be announced any time after its insertion. We aim for the best of both worlds by designing small-space online algorithms for edge coloring. Our online algorithms significantly improve upon the memory used by prior ones while achieving an O(1)-competitive ratio. We study the problem under both (adversarial) edge arrivals and vertex arrivals. Under vertex arrivals of any n-node graph with maximum vertex-degree Δ, our online O(Δ)-coloring algorithm uses only semi-streaming space (i.e., Õ(n) space, where the Õ(.) notation hides polylog(n) factors). Under edge arrivals, we obtain an online O(Δ)-coloring in Õ(n√Δ) space. We also achieve a smooth color-space tradeoff: for any t = O(Δ), we get an O(Δt(log²Δ))-coloring in Õ(n√{Δ/t}) space, improving upon the state of the art that used Õ(nΔ/t) space for the same number of colors. The improvements stem from extensive use of random permutations that enable us to avoid previously used colors. Most of our algorithms can be derandomized and extended to multigraphs, where edge coloring is known to be considerably harder than for simple graphs. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Gørtz, Inge Li; Farach-Colton, Martin; Puglisi, Simon J; Herman, Grzegorz (Ed.)
    We give the first almost-linear time algorithm for computing the maximal k-edge-connected subgraphs of an undirected unweighted graph for any constant k. More specifically, given an n-vertex m-edge graph G = (V,E) and a number k = log^o(1) n, we can deterministically compute in O(m+n^{1+o(1)}) time the unique vertex partition {V_1,… ,V_z} such that, for every i, V_i induces a k-edge-connected subgraph while every superset V'_i ⊃ V_{i} does not. Previous algorithms with linear time work only when k ≤ 2 [Tarjan SICOMP'72], otherwise they all require Ω(m+n√n) time even when k = 3 [Chechik et al. SODA'17; Forster et al. SODA'20]. Our algorithm also extends to the decremental graph setting; we can deterministically maintain the maximal k-edge-connected subgraphs of a graph undergoing edge deletions in m^{1+o(1)} total update time. Our key idea is a reduction to the dynamic algorithm supporting pairwise k-edge-connectivity queries [Jin and Sun FOCS'20]. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; (, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC) 2021)
    Gilbert, Seth (Ed.)
    This paper concerns designing distributed algorithms that are singularly optimal, i.e., algorithms that are simultaneously time and message optimal, for the fundamental leader election problem in asynchronous networks. Kutten et al. (JACM 2015) presented a singularly near optimal randomized leader election algorithm for general synchronous networks that ran in O(D) time and used O(m log n) messages (where D, m, and n are the network’s diameter, number of edges and number of nodes, respectively) with high probability. Both bounds are near optimal (up to a logarithmic factor), since Ω(D) and Ω(m) are the respective lower bounds for time and messages for leader election even for synchronous networks and even for (Monte-Carlo) randomized algorithms. On the other hand, for general asynchronous networks, leader election algorithms are only known that are either time or message optimal, but not both. Kutten et al. (DISC 2020) presented a randomized asynchronous leader election algorithm that is singularly near optimal for complete networks, but left open the problem for general networks. This paper shows that singularly near optimal (up to polylogarithmic factors) bounds can be achieved for general asynchronous networks. We present a randomized singularly near optimal leader election algorithm that runs in O(D + log² n) time and O(m log² n) messages with high probability. Our result is the first known distributed leader election algorithm for asynchronous networks that is near optimal with respect to both time and message complexity and improves over a long line of results including the classical results of Gallager et al. (ACM TOPLAS, 1983), Peleg (JPDC, 1989), and Awerbuch (STOC, 89). 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; (, IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science)
    The online matching problem was introduced by Karp, Vazirani and Vazirani nearly three decades ago. In that seminal work, they studied this problem in bipartite graphs with vertices arriving only on one side, and presented optimal deterministic and randomized algorithms for this setting. In comparison, more general arrival models, such as edge arrivals and general vertex arrivals, have proven more challenging, and positive results are known only for various relaxations of the problem. In particular, even the basic question of whether randomization allows one to beat the trivially-optimal deterministic competitive ratio of 1/2 for either of these models was open. In this paper, we resolve this question for both these natural arrival models, and show the following. For edge arrivals, randomization does not help | no randomized algorithm is better than 1/2 competitive. For general vertex arrivals, randomization helps | there exists a randomized (1/2+ Ω(1))-competitive online matching algorithm. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; ; (, PODS 2023)
    Graph coloring is a fundamental problem with wide reaching applications in various areas including ata mining and databases, e.g., in parallel query optimization. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in solving various graph coloring problems in the streaming model. The initial algorithms in this line of work are all crucially randomized, raising natural questions about how important a role randomization plays in streaming graph coloring. A couple of very recent works prove that deterministic or even adversarially robust coloring algorithms (that work on streams whose updates may depend on the algorithm's past outputs) are considerably weaker than standard randomized ones. However, there is still a significant gap between the upper and lower bounds for the number of colors needed (as a function of the maximum degree Δ) for robust coloring and multipass deterministic coloring. We contribute to this line of work by proving the following results. In the deterministic semi-streaming (i.e., O(n · polylog n) space) regime, we present an algorithm that achieves a combinatorially optimal (Δ+1)-coloring using O(logΔ log logΔ) passes. This improves upon the prior O(Δ)-coloring algorithm of Assadi, Chen, and Sun (STOC 2022) at the cost of only an O(log logΔ) factor in the number of passes. In the adversarially robust semi-streaming regime, we design an O(Δ5/2)-coloring algorithm that improves upon the previously best O(Δ3)-coloring algorithm of Chakrabarti, Ghosh, and Stoeckl (ITCS 2022). Further, we obtain a smooth colors/space tradeoff that improves upon another algorithm of the said work: whereas their algorithm uses O(Δ2) colors and O(nΔ1/2) space, ours, in particular, achieves (i)~O(Δ2) colors in O(nΔ1/3) space, and (ii)~O(Δ7/4) colors in O(nΔ1/2) space. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email