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1. Counting and Sampling Orientations on Chordal Graphs

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96731-4_29  

   Bezakova, Ivona; Sun, Wenbo (January 2022, International Conference and Workshops on Algorithms and Computation (WALCOM))

   We study counting problems for several types of orientations of chordal graphs: source-sink-free orientations, sink-free orientations, acyclic orientations, and bipolar orientations, and, for the latter two, we also present linear-time uniform samplers. Counting sink-free, acyclic, or bipolar orientations are known to be #P-complete for general graphs, motivating our study on a restricted, yet well-studied, graph class. Our main focus is source-sink-free orientations, a natural restricted version of sink-free orientations related to strong orientations, which we introduce in this work. These orientations are intriguing, since despite their similarity, currently known FPRAS and sampling techniques (such as Markov chains or sink-popping) that apply to sink-free orientations do not seem to apply to source-sink-free orientations. We present fast polynomialtime algorithms counting these orientations on chordal graphs. Our approach combines dynamic programming with inclusion-exclusion (going two levels deep for source-sink-free orientations and one level for sinkfree orientations) throughout the computation. Dynamic programming counting algorithms can be typically used to produce a uniformly random sample. However, due to the negative terms of the inclusion-exclusion, the typical approach to obtain a polynomial-time sampling algorithm does not apply in our case. Obtaining such an almost uniform sampling algorithm for source-sink-free orientations in chordal graphs remains an open problem. Little is known about counting or sampling of acyclic or bipolar orientations, even on restricted graph classes. We design efficient (linear-time) exact uniform sampling algorithms for these orientations on chordal graphs. These algorithms are a byproduct of our counting algorithms, but unlike in other works that provide dynamic-programming-based samplers, we produce a random orientation without computing the corresponding count, which leads to a faster running time than the counting algorithm (since it avoids manipulation of large integers). 

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2. Sampling and Counting Acyclic Orientations in Chordal Graphs (Student Abstract)

   https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v36i11.21667  

   Sun, Wenbo (June 2022, Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

   Sampling of chordal graphs and various types of acyclic orientations over chordal graphs plays a central role in several AI applications such as causal structure learning. For a given undirected graph, an acyclic orientation is an assignment of directions to all of its edges which makes the resulting directed graph cycle-free. Sampling is often closely related to the corresponding counting problem. Counting of acyclic orientations of a given chordal graph can be done in polynomial time, but the previously known techniques do not seem to lead to a corresponding (efficient) sampler. In this work, we propose a dynamic programming framework which yields a counter and a uniform sampler, both of which run in (essentially) linear time. An interesting feature of our sampler is that it is a stand-alone algorithm that, unlike other DP-based samplers, does not need any preprocessing which determines the corresponding counts. 

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3. Massively Parallel Algorithms for Small Subgraph Counting

   Biswas, Amartya Shankha; Eden, Talya; Liu, Quanquan C.; Rubinfeld, Ronitt Slobodan (January 2022, Approximation, Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques (APPROX/RANDOM 2022))

   Over the last two decades, frameworks for distributed-memory parallel computation, such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark and Dryad, have gained significant popularity with the growing prevalence of large network datasets. The Massively Parallel Computation (MPC) model is the de-facto standard for studying graph algorithms in these frameworks theoretically. Subgraph counting is one such fundamental problem in analyzing massive graphs, with the main algorithmic challenges centering on designing methods which are both scalable and accurate. Given a graph G = (V, E) with n vertices, m edges and T triangles, our first result is an algorithm that outputs a (1+ε)-approximation to T, with asymptotically optimal round and total space complexity provided any S ≥ max{(√ m, n²/m)} space per machine and assuming T = Ω(√{m/n}). Our result gives a quadratic improvement on the bound on T over previous works. We also provide a simple extension of our result to counting any subgraph of k size for constant k ≥ 1. Our second result is an O_δ(log log n)-round algorithm for exactly counting the number of triangles, whose total space usage is parametrized by the arboricity α of the input graph. We extend this result to exactly counting k-cliques for any constant k. Finally, we prove that a recent result of Bera, Pashanasangi and Seshadhri (ITCS 2020) for exactly counting all subgraphs of size at most 5 can be implemented in the MPC model in Õ_δ(√{log n}) rounds, O(n^δ) space per machine and O(mα³) total space. In addition to our theoretical results, we simulate our triangle counting algorithms in real-world graphs obtained from the Stanford Network Analysis Project (SNAP) database. Our results show that both our approximate and exact counting algorithms exhibit improvements in terms of round complexity and approximation ratio, respectively, compared to two previous widely used algorithms for these problems. 

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4. Quantum Feasibility Labeling for NP-complete Vertex Coloring Problem

   https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2025.3545262  

   Zhan, Junpeng (February 2025, IEEE Access)

   Many important science and engineering problems can be converted into NP-complete problems which are of significant importance in computer science and mathematics. Currently, neither existing classical nor quantum algorithms can solve these problems in polynomial time. To address this difficulty, this paper proposes a quantum feasibility labeling (QFL) algorithm to label all possible solutions to the vertex coloring problem, which is a well-known NP-complete problem. The QFL algorithm converts the vertex coloring problem into the problem of searching an unstructured database where good and bad elements are labeled. The recently proposed variational quantum search (VQS) algorithm was demonstrated to achieve an exponential speedup, in circuit depth, up to 26 qubits in finding good element(s) from an unstructured database. Using the labels and the associated possible solutions as input, the VQS can find all feasible solutions to the vertex coloring problem. The number of qubits and the circuit depth required by the QFL each is a polynomial function of the number of vertices, the number of edges, and the number of colors of a vertex coloring problem. We have implemented the QFL on an IBM Qiskit simulator to solve a 4-colorable 4-vertex 3-edge coloring problem. 

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5. Counting Simplices in Hypergraph Streams

   Chakrabarti, Amit; Haris, Themistoklis (October 2022, Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   We consider the problem of space-efficiently estimating the number of simplices in a hypergraph stream. This is the most natural hypergraph generalization of the highly-studied problem of estimating the number of triangles in a graph stream. Our input is a k-uniform hypergraph H with n vertices and m hyperedges, each hyperedge being a k-sized subset of vertices. A k-simplex in H is a subhypergraph on k+1 vertices X such that all k+1 possible hyperedges among X exist in H. The goal is to process the hyperedges of H, which arrive in an arbitrary order as a data stream, and compute a good estimate of T_k(H), the number of k-simplices in H. We design a suite of algorithms for this problem. As with triangle-counting in graphs (which is the special case k = 2), sublinear space is achievable but only under a promise of the form T_k(H) ≥ T. Under such a promise, our algorithms use at most four passes and together imply a space bound of O(ε^{-2} log δ^{-1} polylog n ⋅ min{(m^{1+1/k})/T, m/(T^{2/(k+1)})}) for each fixed k ≥ 3, in order to guarantee an estimate within (1±ε)T_k(H) with probability ≥ 1-δ. We also give a simpler 1-pass algorithm that achieves O(ε^{-2} log δ^{-1} log n⋅ (m/T) (Δ_E + Δ_V^{1-1/k})) space, where Δ_E (respectively, Δ_V) denotes the maximum number of k-simplices that share a hyperedge (respectively, a vertex), which generalizes a previous result for the k = 2 case. We complement these algorithmic results with space lower bounds of the form Ω(ε^{-2}), Ω(m^{1+1/k}/T), Ω(m/T^{1-1/k}) and Ω(mΔ_V^{1/k}/T) for multi-pass algorithms and Ω(mΔ_E/T) for 1-pass algorithms, which show that some of the dependencies on parameters in our upper bounds are nearly tight. Our techniques extend and generalize several different ideas previously developed for triangle counting in graphs, using appropriate innovations to handle the more complicated combinatorics of hypergraphs. 

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