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1. Approximating Nash Social Welfare under Submodular Valuations through (Un)Matchings

   https://doi.org/10.1137/1.9781611975994.163  

   Garg, Jugal; Kulkarni, Pooja; Kulkarni, Rucha (January 2020, Proceedings of the Annual ACMSIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms)

   We study the problem of approximating maximum Nash social welfare (NSW) when allocating m indivisible items among n asymmetric agents with submodular valuations. The NSW is a well-established notion of fairness and efficiency, defined as the weighted geometric mean of agents' valuations. For special cases of the problem with symmetric agents and additive(-like) valuation functions, approximation algorithms have been designed using approaches customized for these specific settings, and they fail to extend to more general settings. Hence, no approximation algorithm with factor independent of m is known either for asymmetric agents with additive valuations or for symmetric agents beyond additive(-like) valuations. In this paper, we extend our understanding of the NSW problem to far more general settings. Our main contribution is two approximation algorithms for asymmetric agents with additive and submodular valuations respectively. Both algorithms are simple to understand and involve non-trivial modifications of a greedy repeated matchings approach. Allocations of high valued items are done separately by un-matching certain items and re-matching them, by processes that are different in both algorithms. We show that these approaches achieve approximation factors of O(n) and O(n log n) for additive and submodular case respectively, which is independent of the number of items. For additive valuations, our algorithm outputs an allocation that also achieves the fairness property of envy-free up to one item (EF1). Furthermore, we show that the NSW problem under submodular valuations is strictly harder than all currently known settings with an e/(e-1) factor of the hardness of approximation, even for constantly many agents. For this case, we provide a different approximation algorithm that achieves a factor of e/(e-1), hence resolving it completely. 

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2. Tiny Pointers

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3700594  

   Bender, Michael A; Conway, Alex; Farach-Colton, Martín; Kuszmaul, William; Tagliavini, Guido (October 2024, ACM Transactions on Algorithms)

   This paper introduces a new data-structural object that we call the tiny pointer. In many applications, traditional\(\log n\)-bit pointers can be replaced with\(o(\log n)\)-bit tiny pointers at the cost of only a constant-factor time overhead and a small probability of failure. We develop a comprehensive theory of tiny pointers, and give optimal constructions for both fixed-size tiny pointers (i.e., settings in which all of the tiny pointers must be the same size) and variable-size tiny pointers (i.e., settings in which the average tiny-pointer size must be small, but some tiny pointers can be larger). If a tiny pointer references an item in an array filled to load factor\(1-\delta\), then the optimal tiny-pointer size is\(\Theta(\log\log\log n+\log\delta^{-1})\)bits in the fixed-size case, and\(\Theta(\log\delta^{-1})\)expected bits in the variable-size case. Our tiny-pointer constructions also require us to revisit several classic problems having to do with balls and bins; these results may be of independent interest. Using tiny pointers, we apply tiny pointers to five classic data-structure problems. We show that:A data structure storing\(n\)\(v\)-bit values for\(n\)keys with constant-factor time modifications/queries can be implemented to take space\(nv+O(n\log^{(r)}n)\)bits, for any constant\(r\gt0\), as long as the user stores a tiny pointer of expected size\(O(1)\)with each key—here,\(\log^{(r)}n\)is the\(r\)-th iterated logarithm.Any binary search tree can be made succinct, meaning that it achieves\((1+o(1))\)times the optimal space, with constant-factor time overhead, and can even be made to be within\(O(n)\)bits of optimal if we allow for\(O(\log^{*}n)\)-time modifications—this holds even for rotation-based trees such as the splay tree and the red-black tree.Any fixed-capacity key-value dictionary can be made stable (i.e., items do not move once inserted) with constant-factor time overhead and\((1+o(1))\)-factor space overhead.Any key-value dictionary that requires uniform-size values can be made to support arbitrary-size values with constant-factor time overhead and with an additional space consumption of\(\log^{(r)}n+O(\log j)\)bits per\(j\)-bit value for an arbitrary constant\(r\gt0\)of our choice.Given an external-memory array\(A\)of size\((1+\varepsilon)n\)containing a dynamic set of up to\(n\)key-value pairs, it is possible to maintain an internal-memory stash of size\(O(n\log\varepsilon^{-1})\)bits so that the location of any key-value pair in\(A\)can be computed in constant time (and with no IOs). In each case tiny pointers allow for us to take a natural space-inefficient solution that uses pointers and make it space-efficient for free. 

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3. Sketching Approximability of All Finite CSPs

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3649435  

   Chou, Chi-Ning; Golovnev, Alexander; Sudan, Madhu; Velusamy, Santhoshini (April 2024, Journal of the ACM)

   A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP),\(\textsf {Max-CSP}(\mathcal {F})\), is specified by a finite set of constraints\(\mathcal {F}\subseteq \lbrace [q]^k \rightarrow \lbrace 0,1\rbrace \rbrace\)for positive integersqandk. An instance of the problem onnvariables is given bymapplications of constraints from\(\mathcal {F}\)to subsequences of thenvariables, and the goal is to find an assignment to the variables that satisfies the maximum number of constraints. In the (γ ,β)-approximation version of the problem for parameters 0 ≤ β ≤ γ ≤ 1, the goal is to distinguish instances where at least γ fraction of the constraints can be satisfied from instances where at most β fraction of the constraints can be satisfied. In this work, we consider the approximability of this problem in the context of sketching algorithms and give a dichotomy result. Specifically, for every family\(\mathcal {F}\)and every β < γ, we show that either a linear sketching algorithm solves the problem in polylogarithmic space or the problem is not solvable by any sketching algorithm in\(o(\sqrt {n})\)space. In particular, we give non-trivial approximation algorithms using polylogarithmic space for infinitely many constraint satisfaction problems. We also extend previously known lower bounds for general streaming algorithms to a wide variety of problems, and in particular the case ofq=k=2, where we get a dichotomy, and the case when the satisfying assignments of the constraints of\(\mathcal {F}\)support a distribution on\([q]^k\)with uniform marginals. Prior to this work, other than sporadic examples, the only systematic classes of CSPs that were analyzed considered the setting of Boolean variablesq= 2, binary constraintsk=2, and singleton families\(|\mathcal {F}|=1\)and only considered the setting where constraints are placed on literals rather than variables. Our positive results show wide applicability of bias-based algorithms used previously by [47] and [41], which we extend to include richer norm estimation algorithms, by giving a systematic way to discover biases. Our negative results combine the Fourier analytic methods of [56], which we extend to a wider class of CSPs, with a rich collection of reductions among communication complexity problems that lie at the heart of the negative results. In particular, previous works used Fourier analysis over the Boolean cube to initiate their results and the results seemed particularly tailored to functions on Boolean literals (i.e., with negations). Our techniques surprisingly allow us to get to generalq-ary CSPs without negations by appealing to the same Fourier analytic starting point over Boolean hypercubes. 

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4. Joinable Parallel Balanced Binary Trees

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3512769  

   Blelloch, Guy; Ferizovic, Daniel; Sun, Yihan (June 2022, ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing)

   In this article, we show how a single function,join, can be used to implement parallelbalanced binary search trees(BSTs) simply and efficiently. Based onjoin, our approach applies to multiple balanced tree data structures, and a variety of functions for ordered sets and maps. We describe our technique as an algorithmic framework calledjoin-based algorithms. We show that thejoinfunction fully captures what is needed for rebalancing trees for a variety of tree algorithms, as long as the balancing scheme satisfies certain properties, which we refer to asjoinabletrees. We discuss four balancing schemes that are joinable: AVL trees, red-black trees, weight-balanced trees, and treaps. We present a variety of tree algorithms that apply to joinable trees, includinginsert,delete,union,intersection,difference,split,range,filter, and so on, most of them also parallel. These algorithms are generic across balancing schemes. Many algorithms are optimal in the comparison model, and we provide a general proof to show the efficiency in work for joinable trees. The algorithms are highly parallel, all with polylogarithmic span (parallel dependence). Specifically, the set-set operationsunion,intersection, anddifferencehave work\( O(m\log (\frac{n}{m}+1)) \)and polylogarithmic span for input set sizes\( n \)and\( m\le n \). We implemented and tested our algorithms on the four balancing schemes. In general, all four schemes have quite similar performance, but the weight-balanced tree slightly outperforms the others. They have the same speedup characteristics, getting around 73\( \times \)speedup on 72 cores (144 hyperthreads). Experimental results also show that our implementation outperforms existing parallel implementations, and our sequential version achieves close or much better performance than the sequential merging algorithm in C++ Standard Template Library (STL) on various input sizes. 

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5. Bandits with Stochastic Experts: Constant Regret, Empirical Experts and Episodes

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3680279  

   Sharma, Nihal; Sen, Rajat; Basu, Soumya; Shanmugam, Karthikeyan; Shakkottai, Sanjay (September 2024, ACM Transactions on Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computing Systems)

   We study a variant of the contextual bandit problem where an agent can intervene through a set of stochastic expert policies. Given a fixed context, each expert samples actions from a fixed conditional distribution. The agent seeks to remain competitive with the “best” among the given set of experts. We propose the Divergence-based Upper Confidence Bound (D-UCB) algorithm that uses importance sampling to share information across experts and provide horizon-independent constant regret bounds that only scale linearly in the number of experts. We also provide the Empirical D-UCB (ED-UCB) algorithm that can function with only approximate knowledge of expert distributions. Further, we investigate the episodic setting where the agent interacts with an environment that changes over episodes. Each episode can have different context and reward distributions resulting in the best expert changing across episodes. We show that by bootstrapping from\(\mathcal {O}(N\log (NT^2\sqrt {E}))\)samples, ED-UCB guarantees a regret that scales as\(\mathcal {O}(E(N+1) + \frac{N\sqrt {E}}{T^2})\)forNexperts overEepisodes, each of lengthT. We finally empirically validate our findings through simulations. 

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