Interval scheduling is a basic problem in the theory of algorithms and a classical task in combinatorial optimization. We develop a set of techniques for partitioning and grouping jobs based on their starting and ending times, that enable us to view an instance of interval scheduling on many jobs as a union of multiple interval scheduling instances, each containing only a few jobs. Instantiating these techniques in dynamic and local settings of computation leads to several new results. For (1+ε)-approximation of job scheduling of n jobs on a single machine, we develop a fully dynamic algorithm with O((log n)/ε) update and O(log n) query worst-case time. Further, we design a local computation algorithm that uses only O((log N)/ε) queries when all jobs are length at least 1 and have starting/ending times within [0,N]. Our techniques are also applicable in a setting where jobs have rewards/weights. For this case we design a fully dynamic deterministic algorithm whose worst-case update and query time are poly(log n,1/ε). Equivalently, this is the first algorithm that maintains a (1+ε)-approximation of the maximum independent set of a collection of weighted intervals in poly(log n,1/ε) time updates/queries. This is an exponential improvement in 1/ε over the running time of a randomized algorithm of Henzinger, Neumann, and Wiese [SoCG, 2020], while also removing all dependence on the values of the jobs' starting/ending times and rewards, as well as removing the need for any randomness. We also extend our approaches for interval scheduling on a single machine to examine the setting with M machines.
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Langevin Monte Carlo without smoothness
Langevin Monte Carlo (LMC) is an iterative algorithm used to generate samples from a distribution that is known only up to a normalizing constant. The nonasymptotic dependence of its mixing time on the dimension and target accuracy is understood mainly in the setting of smooth (gradient-Lipschitz) log-densities, a serious limitation for applications in machine learning. In this paper, we remove this limitation, providing polynomial-time convergence guarantees for a variant of LMC in the setting of nonsmooth log-concave distributions. At a high level, our results follow by leveraging the implicit smoothing of the log-density that comes from a small Gaussian perturbation that we add to the iterates of the algorithm and controlling the bias and variance that are induced by this perturbation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1909365
- PAR ID:
- 10250952
- Editor(s):
- Chiappa, Silvia; Calandra, Roberto
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
- Volume:
- 108
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1716-1726
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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