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1. Almost-Tight Bounds on Preserving Cuts in Classes of Submodular Hypergraphs

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPICS.ICALP.2024.98  

   Khanna, Sanjeev ; Putterman, Aaron Louie ; Sudan, Madhu ( January 2024 , Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Bringmann, Karl ; Grohe, Martin ; Puppis, Gabriele ; Svensson, Ola (Ed.)

   Recently, a number of variants of the notion of cut-preserving hypergraph sparsification have been studied in the literature. These variants include directed hypergraph sparsification, submodular hypergraph sparsification, general notions of approximation including spectral approximations, and more general notions like sketching that can answer cut queries using more general data structures than just sparsifiers. In this work, we provide reductions between these different variants of hypergraph sparsification and establish new upper and lower bounds on the space complexity of preserving their cuts. Specifically, we show that: 1) (1 ± ε) directed hypergraph spectral (respectively cut) sparsification on n vertices efficiently reduces to (1 ± ε) undirected hypergraph spectral (respectively cut) sparsification on n² + 1 vertices. Using the work of Lee and Jambulapati, Liu, and Sidford (STOC 2023) this gives us directed hypergraph spectral sparsifiers with O(n² log²(n) / ε²) hyperedges and directed hypergraph cut sparsifiers with O(n² log(n)/ ε²) hyperedges by using the work of Chen, Khanna, and Nagda (FOCS 2020), both of which improve upon the work of Oko, Sakaue, and Tanigawa (ICALP 2023). 2) Any cut sketching scheme which preserves all cuts in any directed hypergraph on n vertices to a (1 ± ε) factor (for ε = 1/(2^{O(√{log(n)})})) must have worst-case bit complexity n^{3 - o(1)}. Because directed hypergraphs are a subclass of submodular hypergraphs, this also shows a worst-case sketching lower bound of n^{3 - o(1)} bits for sketching cuts in general submodular hypergraphs. 3) (1 ± ε) monotone submodular hypergraph cut sparsification on n vertices efficiently reduces to (1 ± ε) symmetric submodular hypergraph sparsification on n+1 vertices. Using the work of Jambulapati et. al. (FOCS 2023) this gives us monotone submodular hypergraph sparsifiers with Õ(n / ε²) hyperedges, improving on the O(n³ / ε²) hyperedge bound of Kenneth and Krauthgamer (arxiv 2023). At a high level, our results use the same general principle, namely, by showing that cuts in one class of hypergraphs can be simulated by cuts in a simpler class of hypergraphs, we can leverage sparsification results for the simpler class of hypergraphs. 

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2. Towards Nearly-linear Time Algorithms for Submodular Maximization with a Matroid Constraint

   Ene, Alina ; Nguyen, Huy L. ( July 2019 , International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming)

   We consider fast algorithms for monotone submodular maximization subject to a matroid constraint. We assume that the matroid is given as input in an explicit form, and the goal is to obtain the best possible running times for important matroids. We develop a new algorithm for a general matroid constraint with a $1 - 1/e - \epsilon$ approximation that achieves a fast running time provided we have a fast data structure for maintaining an approximately maximum weight base in the matroid through a sequence of decrease weight operations. We construct such data structures for graphic matroids and partition matroids, and we obtain the first algorithms for these classes of matroids that achieve a nearly-optimal, $1 - 1/e - \epsilon$ approximation, using a nearly-linear number of function evaluations and arithmetic operations. 

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3. Towards Nearly-Linear Time Algorithms for Submodular Maximization with a Matroid Constraint

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2019.54  

   Ene, Alina ; Nguyen, Huy L. ( January 2019 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We consider fast algorithms for monotone submodular maximization subject to a matroid constraint. We assume that the matroid is given as input in an explicit form, and the goal is to obtain the best possible running times for important matroids. We develop a new algorithm for a general matroid constraint with a 1 - 1/e - epsilon approximation that achieves a fast running time provided we have a fast data structure for maintaining an approximately maximum weight base in the matroid through a sequence of decrease weight operations. We construct such data structures for graphic matroids and partition matroids, and we obtain the first algorithms for these classes of matroids that achieve a nearly-optimal, 1 - 1/e - epsilon approximation, using a nearly-linear number of function evaluations and arithmetic operations. 

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4. Sublinear Time Hypergraph Sparsification via Cut and Edge Sampling Queries

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2021.53  

   Chen, Yu ; Khanna, Sanjeev ; Nagda, Sanjeev ( July 2021 , 48th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming)

   null (Ed.)

   The problem of sparsifying a graph or a hypergraph while approximately preserving its cut structure has been extensively studied and has many applications. In a seminal work, Benczúr and Karger (1996) showed that given any n-vertex undirected weighted graph G and a parameter ε ∈ (0,1), there is a near-linear time algorithm that outputs a weighted subgraph G' of G of size Õ(n/ε²) such that the weight of every cut in G is preserved to within a (1 ± ε)-factor in G'. The graph G' is referred to as a (1 ± ε)-approximate cut sparsifier of G. Subsequent recent work has obtained a similar result for the more general problem of hypergraph cut sparsifiers. However, all known sparsification algorithms require Ω(n + m) time where n denotes the number of vertices and m denotes the number of hyperedges in the hypergraph. Since m can be exponentially large in n, a natural question is if it is possible to create a hypergraph cut sparsifier in time polynomial in n, independent of the number of edges. We resolve this question in the affirmative, giving the first sublinear time algorithm for this problem, given appropriate query access to the hypergraph. Specifically, we design an algorithm that constructs a (1 ± ε)-approximate cut sparsifier of a hypergraph H(V,E) in polynomial time in n, independent of the number of hyperedges, when given access to the hypergraph using the following two queries: 1) given any cut (S, ̄S), return the size |δ_E(S)| (cut value queries); and 2) given any cut (S, ̄S), return a uniformly at random edge crossing the cut (cut edge sample queries). Our algorithm outputs a sparsifier with Õ(n/ε²) edges, which is essentially optimal. We then extend our results to show that cut value and cut edge sample queries can also be used to construct hypergraph spectral sparsifiers in poly(n) time, independent of the number of hyperedges. We complement the algorithmic results above by showing that any algorithm that has access to only one of the above two types of queries can not give a hypergraph cut sparsifier in time that is polynomial in n. Finally, we show that our algorithmic results also hold if we replace the cut edge sample queries with a pair neighbor sample query that for any pair of vertices, returns a random edge incident on them. In contrast, we show that having access only to cut value queries and queries that return a random edge incident on a given single vertex, is not sufficient. 

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5. On Sparsification of Stochastic Packing Problems

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2023.51  

   Dughmi, Shaddin ; Kalayci, Yusuf Hakan ; Patel, Neel ( January 2023 , Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)

   Etessami, Kousha ; Feige, Uriel ; Puppis, Gabriele (Ed.)

   Motivated by recent progress on stochastic matching with few queries, we embark on a systematic study of the sparsification of stochastic packing problems more generally. Specifically, we consider packing problems where elements are independently active with a given probability p, and ask whether one can (non-adaptively) compute a "sparse" set of elements guaranteed to contain an approximately optimal solution to the realized (active) subproblem. We seek structural and algorithmic results of broad applicability to such problems. Our focus is on computing sparse sets containing on the order of d feasible solutions to the packing problem, where d is linear or at most polynomial in 1/p. Crucially, we require d to be independent of the number of elements, or any parameter related to the "size" of the packing problem. We refer to d as the "degree" of the sparsifier, as is consistent with graph theoretic degree in the special case of matching. First, we exhibit a generic sparsifier of degree 1/p based on contention resolution. This sparsifier’s approximation ratio matches the best contention resolution scheme (CRS) for any packing problem for additive objectives, and approximately matches the best monotone CRS for submodular objectives. Second, we embark on outperforming this generic sparsifier for additive optimization over matroids and their intersections, as well as weighted matching. These improved sparsifiers feature different algorithmic and analytic approaches, and have degree linear in 1/p. In the case of a single matroid, our sparsifier tends to the optimal solution. In the case of weighted matching, we combine our contention-resolution-based sparsifier with technical approaches of prior work to improve the state of the art ratio from 0.501 to 0.536. Third, we examine packing problems with submodular objectives. We show that even the simplest such problems do not admit sparsifiers approaching optimality. We then outperform our generic sparsifier for some special cases with submodular objectives. 

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