We present a new method for upper bounding the second eigenvalue of the Laplacian of graphs. Our approach uses multi-commodity flows to deform the geometry of the graph; we embed the resulting metric into Euclidean space to recover a bound on the Rayleigh quotient. Using this, we show that every @math -vertex graph of genus @math and maximum degree @math satisfies @math . This recovers the @math bound of Spielman and Teng for planar graphs, and compares to Kelner's bound of @math , but our proof does not make use of conformal mappings or circle packings. We are thus able to extend this to resolve positively a conjecture of Spielman and Teng, by proving that @math whenever @math is @math -minor free. This shows, in particular, that spectral partitioning can be used to recover @math -sized separators in bounded degree graphs that exclude a fixed minor. We extend this further by obtaining nearly optimal bounds on @math for graphs which exclude small-depth minors in the sense of Plotkin, Rao, and Smith. Consequently, we show that spectral algorithms find small separators in a general class of geometric graphs. Moreover, while the standard "sweep" algorithm applied to the second eigenvector may fail to find good quotient cuts in graphs of unbounded degree, our approach produces a vector that works for arbitrary graphs. This yields an alternate proof of the result of Alon, Seymour, and Thomas that every excluded-minor family of graphs has @math -node balanced separators.
Connections with discrete conformal mappings. One can view the minimizer of (or, more appropriately, the maximizer of the vertex version ) as a sort of global uniformizing'' metric for general graphs. In the setting of discrete conformal mappings, a number of variationally defined objects appear, and duality is often an important component in their analysis. We mention, for instance, the extremal length @cite_23 as a prominent example. It also often happens that one chooses a weight function @math as the minimizer of some convex functional, and this weight function plays the role of a discrete Riemannian metric (much as is the case in Section ); see, e.g. the work of Schramm @cite_27 and He and Schramm @cite_20 .
@cite_27 @cite_20 @cite_23
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The maximum a posteriori (MAP) configuration of binary variable models with sub-modular graph-structured energy functions can be found efficiently and exactly by graph cuts. Max-product belief propagation (MP) has been shown to be suboptimal on this class of energy functions by a canonical counterexample where MP converges to a suboptimal fixed point (Kulesza & Pereira, 2008). In this work, we show that under a particular scheduling and damping scheme, MP is equivalent to graph cuts, and thus optimal. We explain the apparent contradiction by showing that with proper scheduling and damping, MP always converges to an optimal fixed point. Thus, the canonical counterexample only shows the suboptimality of MP with a particular suboptimal choice of schedule and damping. With proper choices, MP is optimal. We consider homogeneous factor models on uniformly sparse graph sequences converging locally to a (unimodular) random tree T, and study the existence of the free energy density ϕ, the limit of the log-partition function divided by the number of vertices n as n tends to infinity. We provide a new interpolation scheme and use it to prove existence of, and to explicitly compute, the quantity ϕ subject to uniqueness of a relevant Gibbs measure for the factor model on T. By way of example we compute ϕ for the independent set (or hard-core) model at low fugacity, for the ferromagnetic Ising model at all parameter values, and for the ferromagnetic Potts model with both weak enough and strong enough interactions. Even beyond uniqueness regimes our interpolation provides useful explicit bounds on ϕ. In the regimes in which we establish existence of the limit, we show that it coincides with the Bethe free energy functional evaluated at a suitable fixed point of the belief propagation (Bethe) recursions on T. In the special case that T has a Galton–Watson law, this formula coincides with the nonrigorous “Bethe prediction” obtained by statistical physicists using the “replica” or “cavity” methods. Thus our work is a rigorous generalization of these heuristic calculations to the broader class of sparse graph sequences converging locally to trees. We also provide a variational characterization for the Bethe prediction in this general setting, which is of independent interest. Spanners, emulators, and approximate distance oracles can be viewed as lossy compression schemes that represent an unweighted graph metric in small space, say O(n1+Δ) bits. There is an inherent tradeoff between the sparsity parameter Δ and the stretch function f of the compression scheme, but the qualitative nature of this tradeoff has remained a persistent open problem. It has been known for some time that when Δ ≥ 1 3 there are schemes with constant additive stretch (distance d is stretched to at most f(d) = d + O(1)), and recent results of Abboud and Bodwin show that when Δ In this paper we show that the lower bound of Abboud and Bodwin is just the first step in a hierarchy of lower bounds that characterize the asymptotic behavior of the optimal stretch function f for sparsity parameter Δ ∈ (0,1 3). Specifically, for any integer k ≥ 2, any compression scheme with size [EQUATION] has a sublinear additive stretch function f: f(d) = d + Ω(d1−1 k). This lower bound matches Thorup and Zwick's (2006) construction of sublinear additive emulators. It also shows that Elkin and Peleg's (1 + ϵ, β)-spanners have an essentially optimal tradeoff between Δ, ϵ, and β, and that the sublinear additive spanners of Pettie (2009) and Chechik (2013) are not too far from optimal. To complement these lower bounds we present a new construction of (1 + ϵ, O(k ϵ)k−1)-spanners with size [EQUATION], where hk Our lower bound technique exhibits several interesting degrees of freedom in the framework of Abboud and Bodwin. By carefully exploiting these freedoms, we are able to obtain lower bounds for several related combinatorial objects. We get lower bounds on the size of (β, ϵ)-hopsets, matching Elkin and Neiman's construction (2016), and lower bounds on shortcutting sets for digraphs that preserve the transitive closure. Our lower bound simplifies Hesse's (2003) refutation of Thorup's conjecture (1992), which stated that adding a linear number of shortcuts suffices to reduce the diameter to polylogarithmic. Finally, we show matching upper and lower bounds for graph compression schemes that work for graph metrics with girth at least 2γ + 1. One consequence is that 's (2010) additive O(γ)-spanners with size [EQUATION] cannot be improved in the exponent. We study the connection between the highly non-convex loss function of a simple model of the fully-connected feed-forward neural network and the Hamiltonian of the spherical spin-glass model under the assumptions of: i) variable independence, ii) redundancy in network parametrization, and iii) uniformity. These assumptions enable us to explain the complexity of the fully decoupled neural network through the prism of the results from random matrix theory. We show that for large-size decoupled networks the lowest critical values of the random loss function form a layered structure and they are located in a well-defined band lower-bounded by the global minimum. The number of local minima outside that band diminishes exponentially with the size of the network. We empirically verify that the mathematical model exhibits similar behavior as the computer simulations, despite the presence of high dependencies in real networks. We conjecture that both simulated annealing and SGD converge to the band of low critical points, and that all critical points found there are local minima of high quality measured by the test error. This emphasizes a major difference between largeand small-size networks where for the latter poor quality local minima have nonzero probability of being recovered. Finally, we prove that recovering the global minimum becomes harder as the network size increases and that it is in practice irrelevant as global minimum often leads to overfitting. We prove that any graph excluding Kr as a minor has can be partitioned into clusters of diameter at most Δ while removing at most O(r Δ) fraction of the edges. This improves over the results of Fakcharoenphol and Talwar, who building on the work of Klein, Plotkin and Rao gave a partitioning that required to remove O(r2 Δ) fraction of the edges. Our result is obtained by a new approach that relates the topological properties (excluding a minor) of a graph to its geometric properties (the induced shortest path metric). Specifically, we show that techniques used by Andreae in his investigation of the cops and robbers game on graphs excluding a fixed minor, can be used to construct padded decompositions of the metrics induced by such graphs. In particular, we get probabilistic partitions with padding parameter O(r) and strong-diameter partitions with padding parameter O(r2) for Kr-free graphs, O(k) for treewidth-k graphs, and O(log g) for graphs with genus g. In the work of the authors (2003), we showed that graph cuts can find hypersurfaces of globally minimal length (or area) under any Riemannian metric. Here we show that graph cuts on directed regular grids can approximate a significantly more general class of continuous non-symmetric metrics. Using submodularity condition (Boros and Hammer, 2002 and Kolmogorov and Zabih, 2004), we obtain a tight characterization of graph-representable metrics. Such "submodular" metrics have an elegant geometric interpretation via hypersurface functionals combining length area and flux. Practically speaking, we attend 'geo-cuts' algorithm to a wider class of geometrically motivated hypersurface functionals and show how to globally optimize any combination of length area and flux of a given vector field. The concept of flux was recently introduced into computer vision by Vasilevskiy and Siddiqi (2002) but it was mainly studied within variational framework so far. We are first to show that flux can be integrated into graph cuts as well. Combining geometric concepts of flux and length area within the global optimization framework of graph cuts allows principled discrete segmentation models and advances the slate of the art for the graph cuts methods in vision. In particular we address the "shrinking" problem of graph cuts, improve segmentation of long thin objects, and introduce useful shape constraints. In this paper, a novel Delaunay-based variational approach to isotropic tetrahedral meshing is presented. To achieve both robustness and efficiency, we minimize a simple mesh-dependent energy through global updates of both vertex positions and connectivity. As this energy is known to be the ∠1 distance between an isotropic quadratic function and its linear interpolation on the mesh, our minimization procedure generates well-shaped tetrahedra. Mesh design is controlled through a gradation smoothness parameter and selection of the desired number of vertices. We provide the foundations of our approach by explaining both the underlying variational principle and its geometric interpretation. We demonstrate the quality of the resulting meshes through a series of examples. For the minimum cardinality vertex cover and maximum cardinality matching problems, the max-product form of belief propagation (BP) is known to perform poorly on general graphs. In this paper, we present an iterative loopy annealing BP (LABP) algorithm which is shown to converge and to solve a Linear Programming relaxation of the vertex cover or matching problem on general graphs. LABP finds (asymptotically) a minimum half-integral vertex cover (hence provides a 2-approximation) and a maximum fractional matching on any graph. We also show that LABP finds (asymptotically) a minimum size vertex cover for any bipartite graph and as a consequence compute the matching number of the graph. Our proof relies on some subtle monotonicity arguments for the local iteration. We also show that the Bethe free entropy is concave and that LABP maximizes it. Using loop calculus, we also give an exact (also intractable for general graphs) expression of the partition function for matching in term of the LABP messages which can be used to improve mean-field approximations. We study the metric properties of finite subsets of L1. The analysis of such metrics is central to a number of important algorithmic problems involving the cut structure of weighted graphs, including the Sparsest Cut Problem, one of the most compelling open problems in the field of approximation algorithms. Additionally, many open questions in geometric non-linear functional analysis involve the properties of finite subsets of L1.We present some new observations concerning the relation of L1 to dimension, topology, and Euclidean distortion. We show that every n-point subset of L1 embeds into L2 with average distortion O(√log n), yielding the first evidence that the conjectured worst-case bound of O(√log n) is valid. We also address the issue of dimension reduction in Lp for p ∈ (1, 2). We resolve a question left open by M. Charikar and A. Sahai [Dimension reduction in the l1 norm, in: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual IEEE Conference on Foundations of Computer Science, ACM, 2002, pp. 251-260] concerning the impossibility of dimension reduction with a linear map in the above cases, and we show that a natural variant of the recent example of Brinkman and Charikar [On the impossibility of dimension reduction in l1, in: Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE Conference on Foundations of Computer Science, ACM, 2003, pp. 514-523], cannot be used to prove a lower bound for the non-linear case. This is acomplished by exhibiting constant-distortion embeddings of snowflaked planar metrics into Euclidean space. In this paper we present a new approach for establishing correspondences between sparse image features related by an unknown non-rigid mapping and corrupted by clutter and occlusion, such as points extracted from a pair of images containing a human figure in distinct poses. We formulate this matching task as an energy minimization problem by defining a complex objective function of the appearance and the spatial arrangement of the features. Optimization of this energy is an instance of graph matching, which is in general a NP-hard problem. We describe a novel graph matching optimization technique, which we refer to as dual decomposition (DD), and demonstrate on a variety of examples that this method outperforms existing graph matching algorithms. In the majority of our examples DD is able to find the global minimum within a minute. The ability to globally optimize the objective allows us to accurately learn the parameters of our matching model from training examples. We show on several matching tasks that our learned model yields results superior to those of state-of-the-art methods. Random graph models with limited choice have been studied extensively with the goal of understanding the mechanism of the emergence of the giant component. One of the standard models are the Achlioptas random graph processes on a fixed set of (n ) vertices. Here at each step, one chooses two edges uniformly at random and then decides which one to add to the existing configuration according to some criterion. An important class of such rules are the bounded-size rules where for a fixed (K 1 ), all components of size greater than (K ) are treated equally. While a great deal of work has gone into analyzing the subcritical and supercritical regimes, the nature of the critical scaling window, the size and complexity (deviation from trees) of the components in the critical regime and nature of the merging dynamics has not been well understood. In this work we study such questions for general bounded-size rules. Our first main contribution is the construction of an extension of Aldous’s standard multiplicative coalescent process which describes the asymptotic evolution of the vector of sizes and surplus of all components. We show that this process, referred to as the standard augmented multiplicative coalescent (AMC) is ‘nearly’ Feller with a suitable topology on the state space. Our second main result proves the convergence of suitably scaled component size and surplus vector, for any bounded-size rule, to the standard AMC. This result is new even for the classical Erdős–Renyi setting. The key ingredients here are a precise analysis of the asymptotic behavior of various susceptibility functions near criticality and certain bounds from (The barely subcritical regime. Arxiv preprint, 2012) on the size of the largest component in the barely subcritical regime. Given a graph G, a function f:V(G)->Z, and an initial 0 1-vertex-labelling c"1:V(G)-> 0,1 , we study an iterative 0 1-vertex-labelling process on G where in each round every vertex v never changes its label from 1 to 0, and changes its label from 0 to 1 if at least f(v) neighbours have label 1. Such processes model opinion disease spreading or fault propagation and have been studied under names such as irreversible threshold majority processes in a large variety of contexts. Our contributions concern computational aspects related to the minimum cardinality irr"f(G) of sets of vertices with initial label 1 such that during the process on G all vertices eventually change their label to 1. Such sets are known as irreversible conversion sets, dynamic irreversible monopolies, or catastrophic fault patterns. Answering a question posed by Dreyer and Roberts [P.A. Dreyer Jr., F.S. Roberts, Irreversible k-threshold processes: graph-theoretical threshold models of the spread of disease and of opinion, Discrete Appl. Math. 157 (2009) 1615-1627], we prove a hardness result for irr"f(G) where f(v)=2 for every [email protected]?V(G). Furthermore, we describe a general reduction principle for irr"f(G), which leads to efficient algorithms for graphs with simply structured blocks such as trees and chordal graphs. We define the problem of maximal assortativity matching (MAM) for a complex network graph as the problem of maximizing the similarity of the end vertices (with respect to some measure of node weight) constituting the matching. In this pursuit, we introduce a metric called the assortativity weight of an edge, defined as the product of the number of uncovered adjacent edges and the absolute value of the difference in the weights of the end vertices. The MAM algorithm prefers to include edges that have the smallest assortativity weight in each iteration (one edge per iteration) until all edges are covered. The MAM algorithm can also be adapted to determine a maximal dissortative matching (MDM) to maximize the dissimilarity between the end vertices that are part of a matching as well as to determine a maximal node matching (MNM) that simply maximizes the number of vertices that are part of the matching. We run the MAM, MNM and MDM algorithms on real-world network graphs as well as on the theoretical model-based random network graphs and scale-free network graphs and analyze the tradeoffs between the of node matches and assortativity index (targeted optimal values: 1 for MAM and -1 for MDM). In this paper we explore first passage percolation (FPP) on the Erd˝ os-Renyi random graph Gn(pn), where each edge is given an independent exponential edge weight with rate 1. In the sparse regime, i.e., when npn → λ > 1, we find refined asymptotics both for the minimal weight of the path between uniformly chosen vertices in the giant component, as well as for the hopcount (i.e., the number of edges) on this minimal weight path. More precisely, we prove a central limit theorem for the hopcount, with asymptotic mean and variance both equal to λ (λ − 1) log n. Furthermore, we prove that the minimal weight centered by log n (λ − 1) converges in distribution. We also investigate the dense regime, where npn → ∞. We find that although the base graph is a ultra small (meaning that graph distances between uniformly chosen vertices are o(log n)), attaching random edge weights changes the geometry of the network completely. Indeed, the hopcount Hn satisfies the universality property that whatever be the value of pn, Hn log n → 1 in probability and, more precisely, (Hn−βn log n) √ log n, where βn = λn (λn− 1), has a limiting standard normal distribution. The constant βn can be replaced by 1 precisely when λn ≫ √ log n, a case that has appeared in the literature (under stronger conditions on λn) in (2, 12). We also find bounds for the maximal weight and maximal hopcount between vertices in the graph. This paper continues the investigation of FPP initiated in (2) and (3). Compared to the setting on the configuration model studied in (3), the proofs presented here are much simpler due to a direct relation between FPP on the Erd˝ os-Renyi random graph and thinned continuous-time branching processes. where de denotes normalized surface measure, V is the conformal gradient and q = (2n) (n 2). A modern folklore theorem is that by taking the infinitedimensional limit of this inequality, one obtains the Gross logarithmic Sobolev inequality for Gaussian measure, which determines Nelson's hypercontractive estimates for the Hermite semigroup (see [8]). One observes using conformal invariance that the above inequality is equivalent to the sharp Sobolev inequality on Rn for which boundedness and extremal functions can be easily calculated using dilation invariance and geometric symmetrization. The roots here go back to Hardy and Littlewood. The advantage of casting the problem on the sphere is that the role of the constants is evident, and one is led immediately to the conjecture that this inequality should hold whenever possible (for example, 2 < q < 0o if n = 2). This is in fact true and will be demonstrated in Section 2. A clear question at this point is "What is the situation in dimension 2?" Two important arguments ([25], [26], [27]) dealt with this issue, both motivated by geometric variational problems. Because q goes to infinity for dimension 2, the appropriate function space is the exponential class. Responding in part LetH=(T,U) be a connected graph,V?Ta set, andca non-negative function on the unordered pairs of elements ofV. In theminimum0-extension problem(*), one is asked to minimize the inner productcmover all metricsmonVsuch that (i)mcoincides with the distance function ofHwithinT; and (ii) eachv?Vis at zero distance from somes?T, i.e.m(v,s)=0. This problem is known to be NP-hard ifH=K3(as being equivalent to the minimum 3-terminal cut problem), while it is polynomially solvable ifH=K2(the minimum cut problem) orH=K2,r(the minimum (2,r)-metric problem). We study problem (*) for all fixedH. More precisely, we consider the linear programming relaxation (**) of (*) that is obtained by dropping condition (ii) above, and callHminimizableif the minima in (*) and (**) coincide for allVandc. Note that for such anHproblem (*) is solvable in strongly polynomial time. Our main theorem asserts thatHis minimizable if and only ifHis bipartite, has no isometric circuit with six or more nodes, and is orientable in the sense thatHcan be oriented so that nonadjacent edges of any 4-circuit are oppositely directed along this circuit. The proof is based on a combinatorial and topological study of tight and extreme extensions of graph metrics. Based on the idea of the proof of the NP-hardness for the minimum 3-terminal cut problem in 4, we then show that the minimum 0-extension problem is strongly NP-hard for many non-minimizable graphsH. Other results are also presented. Given a weighted graph with N vertices, consider a real-valued regression problem in a semisupervised setting, where one observes n labeled vertices, and the task is to label the remaining ones. We present a theoretical study of p-based Laplacian regularization under a d-dimensional geometric random graph model. We provide a variational characterization of the performance of this regularized learner as N grows to infinity while n stays constant; the associated optimality conditions lead to a partial differential equation that must be satisfied by the associated function estimate f . From this formulation we derive several predictions on the limiting behavior the function f , including (a) a phase transition in its smoothness at the threshold p = d + 1; and (b) a tradeoff between smoothness and sensitivity to the underlying unlabeled data distribution P . Thus, over the range p ≤ d, the function estimate f is degenerate and “spiky,” whereas for p ≥ d + 1, the function estimate f is smooth. We show that the effect of the underlying density vanishes monotonically with p, such that in the limit p = ∞, corresponding to the so-called Absolutely Minimal Lipschitz Extension, the estimate f is independent of the distribution P . Under the assumption of semi-supervised smoothness, ignoring P can lead to poor statistical performance; in particular, we construct a specific example for d = 1 to demonstrate that p = 2 has lower risk than p =∞ due to the former penalty adapting to P and the latter ignoring it. We also provide simulations that verify the accuracy of our predictions for finite sample sizes. Together, these properties show that p = d + 1 is an optimal choice, yielding a function estimate f that is both smooth and non-degenerate, while remaining maximally sensitive to P . We consider the Landau-de Gennes variational model for nematic liquid crystals, in three-dimensional domains. More precisely, we study the asymptotic behaviour of minimizers as the elastic constant tends to zero, under the assumption that minimizers are uniformly bounded and their energy blows up as the logarithm of the elastic constant. We show that there exists a closed set ( S _ line ) of finite length, such that minimizers converge to a locally harmonic map away from ( S _ line ). Moreover, ( S _ line ) restricted to the interior of the domain is a locally finite union of straight line segments. We provide sufficient conditions, depending on the domain and the boundary data, under which our main results apply. We also discuss some examples. We investigate a class of variational problems that incorporate in some sense curvature information of the level lines. The functionals we consider incorporate metrics defined on the orientations of pairs of line segments that meet in the vertices of the level lines. We discuss two particular instances: One instance that minimizes the total number of vertices of the level lines and another instance that minimizes the total sum of the absolute exterior angles between the line segments. In case of smooth level lines, the latter corresponds to the total absolute curvature. We show that these problems can be solved approximately by means of a tractable convex relaxation in higher dimensions. In our numerical experiments we present preliminary results for image segmentation, image denoising and image inpainting. We consider the problem of positioning a cloud of points in the Euclidean space ℝ d , using noisy measurements of a subset of pairwise distances. This task has applications in various areas, such as sensor network localization and reconstruction of protein conformations from NMR measurements. It is also closely related to dimensionality reduction problems and manifold learning, where the goal is to learn the underlying global geometry of a data set using local (or partial) metric information. Here we propose a reconstruction algorithm based on semidefinite programming. For a random geometric graph model and uniformly bounded noise, we provide a precise characterization of the algorithm’s performance: in the noiseless case, we find a radius r 0 beyond which the algorithm reconstructs the exact positions (up to rigid transformations). In the presence of noise, we obtain upper and lower bounds on the reconstruction error that match up to a factor that depends only on the dimension d, and the average degree of the nodes in the graph.