We consider a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations for the solution of linear programming (LP) problems that was first proposed in the mathematical biology literature as a model for the foraging behavior of acellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum, and more recently considered as a method to solve LPs. We study the convergence time of the continuous Physarum dynamics in the context of the linear programming problem, and derive a new time bound to approximate optimality that depends on the relative entropy between projected versions of the optimal point and of the initial point. The bound scales logarithmically with the LP cost coefficients and linearly with the inverse of the relative accuracy, establishing the efficiency of the dynamics for arbitrary LP instances with positive costs.
The generalization of the Physarum dynamics to linear programming problems that we consider here has been first suggested by Johannson and Zou @cite_18 . Most relevant to the current paper is the work of Straszak and Vishnoi @cite_4 , who initiated the rigorous study of the Physarum dynamics for LP problems of the form . Straszak and Vishnoi proved that a solution to the dynamics exists over the entire time horizon @math , and that a bound on the convergence time of the continuous dynamics can be expressed in terms of the parameter @math , the of the constraint matrix @math , as summarized by their theorem that we quote here for comparison.
@cite_18 @cite_4
2179581407 2963699813 2949839621 2130517245
In this paper we study dynamics inspired by Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold) for solving linear programs [NTY00, IJNT11, JZ12]. These dynamics are arrived at by a local and mechanistic interpretation of the inner workings of the slime mold and a global optimization perspective has been lacking even in the simplest of instances. Our first result is an interpretation of the dynamics as an optimization process. We show that Physarum dynamics can be seen as a steepest-descent type algorithm on a certain Riemannian manifold. Moreover, we prove that the trajectories of Physarum are in fact paths of optimizers to a parametrized family of convex programs, in which the objective is a linear cost function regularized by an entropy barrier. Subsequently, we rigorously establish several important properties of solution curves of Physarum. We prove global existence of such solutions and show that they have limits, being optimal solutions of the underlying LP. Finally, we show that the discretization of the Physarum dynamics is efficient for a class of linear programs, which include unimodular constraint matrices. Thus, together, our results shed some light on how nature might be solving instances of perhaps the most complex problem in P: linear programming. In this paper we study dynamics inspired by Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold) for solving linear programs [NTY00, IJNT11, JZ12]. These dynamics are arrived at by a local and mechanistic interpretation of the inner workings of the slime mold and a global optimization perspective has been lacking even in the simplest of instances. Our first result is an interpretation of the dynamics as an optimization process. We show that Physarum dynamics can be seen as a steepest-descent type algorithm on a certain Riemannian manifold. Moreover, we prove that the trajectories of Physarum are in fact paths of optimizers to a parametrized family of convex programs, in which the objective is a linear cost function regularized by an entropy barrier. Subsequently, we rigorously establish several important properties of solution curves of Physarum. We prove global existence of such solutions and show that they have limits, being optimal solutions of the underlying LP. Finally, we show that the discretization of the Physarum dynamics is efficient for a class of linear programs, which include unimodular constraint matrices. Thus, together, our results shed some light on how nature might be solving instances of perhaps the most complex problem in P: linear programming. The paper deals with the convergence properties of the products of random (row-)stochastic matrices. The limiting behavior of such products is studied from a dynamical system point of view. In particular, by appropriately defining a dynamic associated with a given sequence of random (row-)stochastic matrices, we prove that the dynamics admits a class of time-varying Lyapunov functions, including a quadratic one. Then, we discuss a special class of stochastic matrices, a class @math , which plays a central role in this work. We then introduce balanced chains and using some geometric properties of these chains, we characterize the stability of a subclass of balanced chains. As a special consequence of this stability result, we obtain an extension of a central result in the non-negative matrix theory stating that, for any aperiodic and irreducible row-stochastic matrix @math , the limit @math exists and it is a rank one stochastic matrix. We show that a generalization of this result holds not only for sequences of stochastic matrices but also for independent random sequences of such matrices. The problem of obtaining the maximum a posteriori estimate of a general discrete Markov random field (i.e., a Markov random field defined using a discrete set of labels) is known to be NP-hard. However, due to its central importance in many applications, several approximation algorithms have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we present an analysis of three such algorithms based on convex relaxations: (i) LP-S: the linear programming (LP) relaxation proposed by Schlesinger (1976) for a special case and independently in (2001), (1998), and (2005) for the general case; (ii) QP-RL: the quadratic programming (QP) relaxation of Ravikumar and Lafferty (2006); and (iii) SOCP-MS: the second order cone programming (SOCP) relaxation first proposed by Muramatsu and Suzuki (2003) for two label problems and later extended by (2006) for a general label set. We show that the SOCP-MS and the QP-RL relaxations are equivalent. Furthermore, we prove that despite the flexibility in the form of the constraints objective function offered by QP and SOCP, the LP-S relaxation strictly dominates (i.e., provides a better approximation than) QP-RL and SOCP-MS. We generalize these results by defining a large class of SOCP (and equivalent QP) relaxations which is dominated by the LP-S relaxation. Based on these results we propose some novel SOCP relaxations which define constraints using random variables that form cycles or cliques in the graphical model representation of the random field. Using some examples we show that the new SOCP relaxations strictly dominate the previous approaches.