We provide recovery guarantees for compressible signals that have been corrupted with noise and extend the framework introduced in [1] to defend neural networks against @math -norm and @math -norm attacks. Concretely, for a signal that is approximately sparse in some transform domain and has been perturbed with noise, we provide guarantees for accurately recovering the signal in the transform domain. We can then use the recovered signal to reconstruct the signal in its original domain while largely removing the noise. Our results are general as they can be directly applied to most unitary transforms used in practice and hold for both @math -norm bounded noise and @math -norm bounded noise. In the case of @math -norm bounded noise, we prove recovery guarantees for Iterative Hard Thresholding (IHT) and Basis Pursuit (BP). For the case of @math -norm bounded noise, we provide recovery guarantees for BP. These guarantees theoretically bolster the defense framework introduced in [1] for defending neural networks against adversarial inputs. Finally, we experimentally demonstrate this defense framework using both IHT and BP against the One Pixel Attack [21], Carlini-Wagner @math and @math attacks [3], Jacobian Saliency Based attack [18], and the DeepFool attack [17] on CIFAR-10 [12], MNIST [13], and Fashion-MNIST [27] datasets. This expands beyond the experimental demonstrations of [1].
The authors of @cite_0 introduced the CRD framework which inspired this work. The main theorem (Theorem 2.2) of @cite_0 is an analog of our Theorem and provides a similar bound the approximation error for recovery via IHT. First note that the statement of the Theorem 2.2 of @cite_0 is missing the required hypothesis @math . This hypothesis appears in Lemma 3.6 of @cite_0 , which is used to prove Theorem 2.2, but it appears to have been accidentally dropped from the statement of Theorem 2.2. We note that, by making the constants explicit, the proof of Lemma 3.6 of @cite_0 gives the same restricted isometry property that we do in Theorem . Therefore, the guarantees we obtain for IHT are essentially the same as in @cite_0 . The main difference is that, to derive recovery guarantees for IHT from the restricted isometry property, we utilize Theorem below (which is a modified version of Theorem 6.18 of @cite_15 ) while the authors of @cite_0 utilize Theorem 3.4 in @cite_0 (which is taken from @cite_19 ).
@cite_0 @cite_19 @cite_15
2963702702 2296866626 2000931246 2119883478 2609098951 2963000079 1615542443 2168831133 2066969286 2096586829 2003571173 2336459687 2021217869 2406740263 2083945855 2147276092 1980652450 2032049628 2949121341 2962858508
We prove tight upper bounds on the logarithmic derivative of the independence and matching polynomials of d-regular graphs. For independent sets, this theorem is a strengthening of Kahn's result that a disjoint union of copies of Kd;d maximizes the number of independent sets of a bipartite d-regular graph, Galvin and Tet ali's result that the independence polynomial is maximized by the same, and Zhao's extension of both results to all d-regular graphs. For matchings, this shows that the matching polynomial and the total number of matchings of a d-regular graph are maximized by a union of copies of Kd;d. Using this we prove the asymptotic upper matching conjecture of Friedland, Krop, Lundow, and Markstrom. In probabilistic language, our main theorems state that for all d-regular graphs and all �, the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model and the edge occupancy fraction of the monomer-dimer model with fugacity � are maximized by Kd;d. Our method involves constrained optimization problems over distributions of random variables and applies to all d-regular graphs directly, without a reduction to the bipartite case. Using a variant of the method we prove a lower bound on the occupancy fraction of the hard-core model on any d-regular, vertex-transitive, bipartite graph: the occupancy fraction of such a graph is strictly greater than the occupancy fraction of the unique translationinvariant hard-core measure on the infinite d-regular tree Two central limit theorems for sample Fr 'echet means are derived, both significant for nonparametric inference on non-Euclidean spaces. The first one, Theorem 2.2, encompasses and improves upon most earlier CLTs on Fr 'echet means and broadens the scope of the methodology beyond manifolds to diverse new non-Euclidean data including those on certain stratified spaces which are important in the study of phylogenetic trees. It does not require that the underlying distribution @math have a density, and applies to both intrinsic and extrinsic analysis. The second theorem, Theorem 3.3, focuses on intrinsic means on Riemannian manifolds of dimensions @math and breaks new ground by providing a broad CLT without any of the earlier restrictive support assumptions. It makes the statistically reasonable assumption of a somewhat smooth density of @math . The excluded case of dimension @math proves to be an enigma, although the first theorem does provide a CLT in this case as well under a support restriction. Theorem 3.3 immediately applies to spheres @math , @math , which are also of considerable importance in applications to axial spaces and to landmarks based image analysis, as these spaces are quotients of spheres under a Lie group @math of isometries of @math . Let f be a random Boolean formula that is an instance of 3-SAT. We consider the problem of computing the least real number k such that if the ratio of the number of clauses over the number of variables of f strictly exceeds k , then f is almost certainly unsatisfiable. By a well-known and more or less straightforward argument, it can be shown that kF5.191. This upper bound was improved by to 4.758 by first providing new improved bounds for the occupancy problem. There is strong experimental evidence that the value of k is around 4.2. In this work, we define, in terms of the random formula f, a decreasing sequence of random variables such that, if the expected value of any one of them converges to zero, then f is almost certainly unsatisfiable. By letting the expected value of the first term of the sequence converge to zero, we obtain, by simple and elementary computations, an upper bound for k equal to 4.667. From the expected value of the second term of the sequence, we get the value 4.601q . In general, by letting the U This work was performed while the first author was visiting the School of Computer Science, Carleton Ž University, and was partially supported by NSERC Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council . of Canada , and by a grant from the University of Patras for sabbatical leaves. The second and third Ž authors were supported in part by grants from NSERC Natural Sciences and Engineering Research . Council of Canada . During the last stages of this research, the first and last authors were also partially Ž . supported by EU ESPRIT Long-Term Research Project ALCOM-IT Project No. 20244 . †An extended abstract of this paper was published in the Proceedings of the Fourth Annual European Ž Symposium on Algorithms, ESA’96, September 25]27, 1996, Barcelona, Spain Springer-Verlag, LNCS, . pp. 27]38 . That extended abstract was coauthored by the first three authors of the present paper. Correspondence to: L. M. Kirousis Q 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 1042-9832r98r030253-17 253 Under certain conditions (known as the restricted isometry property, or RIP) on the mN matrix ˆ (where m<N ), vectors x 2 R N that are sparse (i.e., have most of their entries equal to 0) can be recovered exactly from y WDx even though ˆ � 1 .y is typically an .Nm -dimensional hyperplane; in addition, x is then equal to the element in ˆ � 1 .y of minimal 1-norm. This minimal element can be identified via linear programming algorithms. We study an alternative method of determining x, as the limit of an iteratively reweighted least squares (IRLS) algorithm. The main step of this IRLS finds, for a given weight vector w, the element in ˆ � 1 .y with smallest 2.w -norm. If x .n is the solution at itera- tion step n, then the new weight w .n is defined by w .n WD Œjx .n j 2 C " 2� � 1=2 , i D 1; :::;N , for a decreasing sequence of adaptively defined "n; this updated weight is then used to obtain x .nC1 and the process is repeated. We prove that whensatisfies the RIP conditions, the sequence x .n converges for all y, re- gardless of whether ˆ � 1 .y contains a sparse vector. If there is a sparse vector in ˆ � 1 .y , then the limit is this sparse vector, and when x .n is sufficiently close to the limit, the remaining steps of the algorithm converge exponentially fast (linear convergence in the terminology of numerical optimization). The same al- gorithm with the "heavier" weight w .n D Œjx .n The full' edge isoperimetric inequality for the discrete cube (due to Harper, Bernstein, Lindsay and Hart) specifies the minimum size of the edge boundary @math of a set @math , as a function of @math . A weaker (but more widely-used) lower bound is @math , where equality holds iff @math is a subcube. In 2011, the first author obtained a sharp stability' version of the latter result, proving that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math . The weak' version of the edge isoperimetric inequality has the following well-known generalization for the @math -biased' measure @math on the discrete cube: if @math , or if @math and @math is monotone increasing, then @math . In this paper, we prove a sharp stability version of the latter result, which generalizes the aforementioned result of the first author. Namely, we prove that if @math , then there exists a subcube @math such that @math , where @math . This result is a central component in recent work of the authors proving sharp stability versions of a number of Erd o s-Ko-Rado type theorems in extremal combinatorics, including the seminal complete intersection theorem' of Ahlswede and Khachatrian. In addition, we prove a biased-measure analogue of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, for monotone increasing sets, and we observe that such an analogue does not hold for arbitrary sets, hence answering a question of Kalai. We use this result to give a new proof of the full' edge isoperimetric inequality, one relying on the Kruskal-Katona theorem. An (n, k, l) MDS code of length n, dimension k and sub-packetization l over a finite field F is a set of n symbol vectors of length l over F with the property that any k vector can recover the entire data of kl symbols. When a node fails we can recover it by downloading symbols from the surviving nodes, and the total number of symbols downloaded in th worst case is the repair bandwidth of the code. By the cut-se bound, the repair bandwidth of an (n, k, l) MDS code is at leas (n − 1)l (n − k). There are several constructions of (n, k, l) MDS codes whose repair bandwidths meet or asymptotically meet the cut-se bound. Letting r = n − k denote the number of parities Ye and Barg constructed (n, k, rn) Reed-Solomon codes the asymptotically meet the cut-set bound. Ye and Barg also constructed optimal bandwidth and optimal update (n, k, rn MDS codes. A key idea in these constructions is to expand integers in base r. We show in this paper that, when r is an integral power, w can significantly reduce the sub-packetization of the Ye-Barg constructions while achieving asymptotically optimal repair bandwidth. As an example, when r = 2m, we achieve the sub-packetization of 2m+n−1, which improves upon the sub packetization of 2mn in the Ye-Barg constructions. In general when r = sm for an integer s  2, our codes have sub packetization l = sm+n−1 = rsn−1. Specifically, in the casi r = sm, we obtain an (n, k, sm+n=1) Reed-Solomon code an an optimal update (n, k, sm+n−1) MDS code, which both have asymptotically optimal repair bandwidth. In order to obtain these results, we extend and generalize the r-ary expansion idea in the Ye-Barg constructions. Even when r is not an integral power, we can still obtain (n, k, sm+n−1) Reed-Solomon codes and optimal update (n, k, sm+n−1) MDS codes by choosing positive integers s an m such that sm  r. In this case, however, the resulting codes have bandwidth that is near-optimal rather than asymptotically optimal. We prove an extension of McDiarmid's inequality for metric spaces with unbounded diameter. To this end, we introduce the notion of the subgaussian diameter, which is a distribution-dependent refinement of the metric diameter. Our technique provides an alternative approach to that of Kutin and Niyogi's method of weakly difference-bounded functions, and yields nontrivial, dimension-free results in some interesting cases where the former does not. As an application, we give apparently the first generalization bound in the algorithmic stability setting that holds for unbounded loss functions. This yields a novel risk bound for some regularized metric regression algorithms. We give two extensions of the basic concentration result. The first enables one to replace the independence assumption by appropriate strong mixing. The second generalizes the subgaussian technique to other Orlicz norms. The goal of (stable) sparse recovery is to recover a @math -sparse approximation @math of a vector @math from linear measurements of @math . Specifically, the goal is to recover @math such that @math for some constant @math and norm parameters @math and @math . It is known that, for @math or @math , this task can be accomplished using @math non-adaptive measurements CRT06:Stable-Signal and that this bound is tight DIPW, FPRU, PW11 . In this paper we show that if one is allowed to perform measurements that are adaptive , then the number of measurements can be considerably reduced. Specifically, for @math and @math we show A scheme with @math measurements that uses @math rounds. This is a significant improvement over the best possible non-adaptive bound. A scheme with @math measurements that uses two rounds. This improves over the best possible non-adaptive bound. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first results of this type. Beck's early work [3] gave an efficient version of the Lovasz Local Lemma(LLL) with significant compromise in the parameters. Following several improvements [1,7,4,13], Moser [8], and Moser and Tardos [9] obtained asymptotically optimal results in terms of the maximal degree. For a fixed dependency graph G the exact criterion under which LLL applies is given by Shearer in [12]. For a dependency structure G, let LO(G) be the set of those probability assignments to the nodes of G for which the Lovasz Local Lemma holds. We show that: Both the sequential and parallel ersions of the Moser-Tardos algorithm are efficient up to the Shearer's bound, by giving a tighter analysis. We also prove that, whenever p ∈ LO(G) (1+e), the expected running times of the sequential and parallel versions are at most n e and O(1 e log n e), the later when e This paper studies the problem of recovering a sparse signal x ∈ ℝn from highly corrupted linear measurements y = Ax + e ∈ ℝm, where e is an unknown error vector whose nonzero entries may be unbounded. Motivated by an observation from face recognition in computer vision, this paper proves that for highly correlated (and possibly overcomplete) dictionaries A, any sufficiently sparse signal x can be recovered by solving an l1 -minimization problem min ||x||1 + ||e||1 subject to y = Ax + e. More precisely, if the fraction of the support of the error e is bounded away from one and the support of a: is a very small fraction of the dimension m, then as m becomes large the above l1 -minimization succeeds for all signals x and almost all sign-and-support patterns of e. This result suggests that accurate recovery of sparse signals is possible and computationally feasible even with nearly 100 of the observations corrupted. The proof relies on a careful characterization of the faces of a convex polytope spanned together by the standard crosspolytope and a set of independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) Gaussian vectors with nonzero mean and small variance, dubbed the "cross-and-bouquet" (CAB) model. Simulations and experiments corroborate the findings, and suggest extensions to the result. This paper considers the problem of recovering an unknown sparse p×p matrix X from an m×m matrix Y=AXB T , where A and B are known m×p matrices with m≪p. The main result shows that there exist constructions of the sketching matrices A and B so that even if X has O(p) nonzeros, it can be recovered exactly and efficiently using a convex program as long as these nonzeros are not concentrated in any single row column of X. Furthermore, it suffices for the size of Y (the sketch dimension) to scale as m = O(√(# nonzeros in X) × log p). The results also show that the recovery is robust and stable in the sense that if X is equal to a sparse matrix plus a perturbation, then the convex program we propose produces an approximation with accuracy proportional to the size of the perturbation. Unlike traditional results on sparse recovery, where the sensing matrix produces independent measurements, our sensing operator is highly constrained (it assumes a tensor product structure). Therefore, proving recovery guarantees require nonstandard techniques. Indeed, our approach relies on a novel result concerning tensor products of bipartite graphs, which may be of independent interest. This problem is motivated by the following application, among others. Consider a p×n data matrix D, consisting of n observations of p variables. Assume that the correlation matrix X:=DD T is (approximately) sparse in the sense that each of the p variables is significantly correlated with only a few others. Our results show that these significant correlations can be detected even if we have access to only a sketch of the data S=AD with A ∈ R m×p . Erdős-Ko-Rado (EKR) type theorems yield upper bounds on the sizes of families of sets, subject to various intersection requirements on the sets in the family. Stability versions of such theorems assert that if the size of a family is close to the maximum possible size, then the family itself must be close (in some appropriate sense) to a maximum-sized family. In this paper, we present an approach to obtaining stability versions of EKR-type theorems, via isoperimetric inequalities for subsets of the hypercube. Our approach is rather general, and allows the leveraging of a wide variety of exact EKR-type results into strong stability versions of these results, without going into the proofs of the original results. We use this approach to obtain tight stability versions of the EKR theorem itself and of the Ahlswede-Khachatrian theorem on @math -intersecting families of @math -element subsets of @math (for @math ), and to show that, somewhat surprisingly, all these results hold when the intersection requirement is replaced by a much weaker requirement. Other examples include stability versions of Frankl's recent result on the Erdős matching conjecture, the Ellis-Filmus-Friedgut proof of the Simonovits-Sos conjecture, and various EKR-type results on @math -wise (cross)- @math -intersecting families. A well known but incorrect piece of functional programming folklore is that ML expressions can be efficiently typed in polynomial time. In probing the truth of that folklore, various researchers, including Wand, Buneman, Kanellakis, and Mitchell, constructed simple counterexamples consisting of typable ML programs having length n , with principal types having O(2 cn ) distinct type variables and length O(2 2cn ). When the types associated with these ML constructions were represented as directed acyclic graphs, their sizes grew as O(2 cn ). The folklore was even more strongly contradicted by the recent result of Kanellakis and Mitchell that simply deciding whether or not an ML expression is typable is PSPACE-hard. We improve the latter result, showing that deciding ML typability is DEXPTIME-hard. As Kanellakis and Mitchell have shown containment in DEXPTIME, the problem is DEXPTIME-complete. The proof of DEXPTIME-hardness is carried out via a generic reduction: it consists of a very straightforward simulation of any deterministic one-tape Turing machine M with input k running in O ( c |k| ) time by a polynomial-sized ML formula P M,k , such that M accepts k iff P M,k is typable. The simulation of the transition function δ of the Turing Machine is realized uniquely through terms in the lambda calculus without the use of the polymorphic let construct. We use let for two purposes only: to generate an exponential amount of blank tape for the Turing Machine simulation to begin, and to compose an exponential number of applications of the ML formula simulating state transition. It is purely the expressive power of ML polymorphism to succinctly express function composition which results in a proof of DEXPTIME-hardness. We conjecture that lower bounds on deciding typability for extensions to the typed lambda calculus can be regarded precisely in terms of this expressive capacity for succinct function composition. To further understand this lower bound, we relate it to the problem of proving equality of type variables in a system of type equations generated from an ML expression with let-polymorphism. We show that given an oracle for solving this problem, deciding typability would be in PSPACE, as would be the actual computation of the principal type of the expression, were it indeed typable. The goal of sparse recovery is to recover a k-sparse signal x e Rn from (possibly noisy) linear measurements of the form y = Ax, where A e Rmxn describes the measurement process. Standard results in compressive sensing show that it is possible to recover the signal x from m = O(k log(n k)) measurements, and that this bound is tight. The framework of model-based compressive sensing [BCDH10] overcomes the lower bound and reduces the number of measurements further to O(k) by limiting the supports of x to a subset M of the (nk) possible supports. This has led to many measurement-efficient algorithms for a wide variety of signal models, including block-sparsity and tree-sparsity. Unfortunately, extending the framework to other, more general models has been stymied by the following obstacle: for the framework to apply, one needs an algorithm that, given a signal x, solves the following optimization problem exactly: [EQUATION] (here x[n] denotes the projection of x on coordinates not in Ω). However, an approximation algorithm for this optimization task is not sufficient. Since many problems of this form are not known to have exact polynomial-time algorithms, this requirement poses an obstacle for extending the framework to a richer class of models. In this paper, we remove this obstacle and show how to extend the model-based compressive sensing framework so that it requires only approximate solutions to the aforementioned optimization problems. Interestingly, our extension requires the existence of approximation algorithms for both the maximization and the minimization variants of the optimization problem. Further, we apply our framework to the Constrained Earth Mover's Distance (CEMD) model introduced in [SHI13], obtaining a sparse recovery scheme that uses significantly less than O(k log(n k)) measurements. This is the first non-trivial theoretical bound for this model, since the validation of the approach presented in [SHI13] was purely empirical. The result is obtained by designing a novel approximation algorithm for the maximization version of the problem and proving approximation guarantees for the minimization algorithm described in [SHI13]. Abstract We investigate the recovery of almost s -sparse vectors x ∈ C N from undersampled and inaccurate data y = A x + e ∈ C m by means of minimizing ‖ z ‖ 1 subject to the equality constraints A z = y . If m ≍ s ln ( N s ) and if Gaussian random matrices A ∈ R m × N are used, this equality-constrained l 1 -minimization is known to be stable with respect to sparsity defects and robust with respect to measurement errors. If m ≍ s ln ( N s ) and if Weibull random matrices are used, we prove here that the equality-constrained l 1 -minimization remains stable and robust. The arguments are based on two key ingredients, namely the robust null space property and the quotient property. The robust null space property relies on a variant of the classical restricted isometry property where the inner norm is replaced by the l 1 -norm and the outer norm is replaced by a norm comparable to the l 2 -norm. For the l 1 -minimization subject to inequality constraints, this yields stability and robustness results that are also valid when considering sparsity relative to a redundant dictionary. As for the quotient property, it relies on lower estimates for the tail probability of sums of independent Weibull random variables. Traditional sampling theories consider the problem of reconstructing an unknown signal x from a series of samples. A prevalent assumption which often guarantees recovery from the given measurements is that x lies in a known subspace. Recently, there has been growing interest in nonlinear but structured signal models, in which x lies in a union of subspaces. In this paper, we develop a general framework for robust and efficient recovery of such signals from a given set of samples. More specifically, we treat the case in which x lies in a sum of k subspaces, chosen from a larger set of m possibilities. The samples are modeled as inner products with an arbitrary set of sampling functions. To derive an efficient and robust recovery algorithm, we show that our problem can be formulated as that of recovering a block-sparse vector whose nonzero elements appear in fixed blocks. We then propose a mixed lscr2 lscr1 program for block sparse recovery. Our main result is an equivalence condition under which the proposed convex algorithm is guaranteed to recover the original signal. This result relies on the notion of block restricted isometry property (RIP), which is a generalization of the standard RIP used extensively in the context of compressed sensing. Based on RIP, we also prove stability of our approach in the presence of noise and modeling errors. A special case of our framework is that of recovering multiple measurement vectors (MMV) that share a joint sparsity pattern. Adapting our results to this context leads to new MMV recovery methods as well as equivalence conditions under which the entire set can be determined efficiently. This paper considers the inverse problem with observed variables Y = BGX ⊕Z, where BG is the incidence matrix of a graph G, X is the vector of unknown vertex variables with a uniform prior, and Z is a noise vector with Bernoulli(e) i.i.d. entries. All variables and operations are Boolean. This model is motivated by coding, synchronization, and community detection problems. In particular, it corresponds to a stochastic block model or a correlation clustering problem with two communities and censored edges. Without noise, exact recovery of X is possible if and only the graph G is connected, with a sharp threshold at the edge probability log(n) n for Erdős-Renyi random graphs. The first goal of this paper is to determine how the edge probability p needs to scale to allow exact recovery in the presence of noise. Defining the degree (oversampling) rate of the graph by α = np log(n), it is shown that exact recovery is possible if and only if α > 2 (1−2e)+o(1 (1−2e)). In other words, 2 (1−2e) is the information theoretic threshold for exact recovery at lowSNR. In addition, an efficient recovery algorithm based on semidefinite programming is proposed and shown to succeed in the threshold regime up to twice the optimal rate. Full version available in [1]. Let (a>0, b>0, ab<1; ) and let (g L^2( R ). ) In this paper we investigate the relation between the frame operator (S:f L^2( R ) n,m ,(f,g_ na,mb ) ,g_ na,mb ) and the matrix (H ) whose entries (H_ k,l ,; ,k',l' ) are given by ((g_ k' b,l' a ,g_ k b,l a ) ) for (k,l,k',l' Z . ) Here (f_ x,y (t)= exp (2 iyt) ,f(t-x), ) (t R ), for any (f L^2( R ). ) We show that (S ) is bounded as a mapping of (L^2( R ) ) into (L^2( R ) ) if and only if (H ) is bounded as a mapping of (l^2( Z ^2) ) into (l^2( Z ^2). ) Also we show that (AI S BI ) if and only if (AI 1 ab ,H BI, ) where (I ) denotes the identity operator of (L^2( R ) ) and (l^2( Z ^2), ) respectively, and (A 0, ) (B< . ) Next, when (g ) generates a frame, we have that ((g_ k b,l a )_ k,l ) has an upper frame bound, and the minimal dual function (^ ) can be computed as (ab , k,l ,(H^ -1 )_ k,l ,; ,o,o ,g_ k b,l a . ) The results of this paper extend, generalize, and rigourize results of Wexler and Raz and of Qian, D. Chen, K. Chen, and Li on the computation of dual functions for finite, discrete-time Gabor expansions to the infinite, continuous-time case. Furthermore, we present a framework in which one can show that certain smoothness and decay properties of a (g ) generating a frame are inherited by (^ . ) In particular, we show that (^ S ) when (g S ) generates a frame (( S ) Schwartz space). The proofs of the main results of this paper rely heavily on a technique introduced by Tolimieri and Orr for relating frame bound questions on complementary lattices by means of the Poisson summation formula. We study the problem of fair allocation for indivisible goods. We use the the maxmin share paradigm introduced by Budish as a measure for fairness. Procacciafirst (EC'14) were first to investigate this fundamental problem in the additive setting. In contrast to what real-world experiments suggest, they show that a maxmin guarantee (1- @math allocation) is not always possible even when the number of agents is limited to 3. While the existence of an approximation solution (e.g. a @math - @math allocation) is quite straightforward, improving the guarantee becomes subtler for larger constants. Procaccia provide a proof for existence of a @math - @math allocation and leave the question open for better guarantees. Our main contribution is an answer to the above question. We improve the result of ! to a @math factor in the additive setting. The main idea for our @math - @math allocation method is clustering the agents. To this end, we introduce three notions and techniques, namely reducibility, matching allocation, and cycle-envy-freeness, and prove the approximation guarantee of our algorithm via non-trivial applications of these techniques. Our analysis involves coloring and double counting arguments that might be of independent interest. One major shortcoming of the current studies on fair allocation is the additivity assumption on the valuations. We alleviate this by extending our results to the case of submodular, fractionally subadditive, and subadditive settings. More precisely, we give constant approximation guarantees for submodular and XOS agents, and a logarithmic approximation for the case of subadditive agents. Furthermore, we complement our results by providing close upper bounds for each class of valuation functions. Finally, we present algorithms to find such allocations for additive, submodular, and XOS settings in polynomial time. The repair problem for an (n, k) error-correcting code calls for recovery of an unavailable coordinate of the codeword by downloading as little information as possible from a subset of the remaining coordinates. Using the terminology motivated by coding in distributed storage, we attempt to repair a failed node by accessing information stored on d helper nodes, where k &#x227C; d &#x227C; n &#x2013; 1, and using as little repair bandwidth as possible to recover the lost information.By the so-called cut-set bound (, 2010), the repair bandwidth of an (n,k = n &#x2013; r) MDS code using d helper nodes is at least dl (d + 1 &#x2013; k), where l is the size of the node. A number of constructions of MDS array codes have been shown to meet this bound with equality. In a related but separate line of work, Guruswami and Wootters (2016) studied repair of Reed-Solomon (RS) codes, showing that it is possible to perform repair using a smaller bandwidth than under the trivial approach. At the same time, their work as well as follow-up papers stopped short of constructing RS codes (or any scalar MDS codes) that meet the cut-set bound with equality, which has been an open problem in coding theory.In this work we present a solution to this problem, constructing RS codes of length n over the field of size (ql, l = exp((1 + o(1)n log n) that meet the cut-set bound. We also prove an almost matching lower bound on l, showing that super-exponential scaling is both necessary and sufficient for achieving the cut-set bound using linear repair schemes. More precisely, we prove that for scalar MDS codes (including the RS codes) to meet this bound, the sub-packetization l must satisfy l &#x227D; exp((1 + o(1))k log k).