We consider the following problem. Given a 2-CNF formula, is it possible to remove at most @math clauses so that the resulting 2-CNF formula is satisfiable? This problem is known to different research communities in Theoretical Computer Science under the names 'Almost 2-SAT', 'All-but- @math 2-SAT', '2-CNF deletion', '2-SAT deletion'. The status of fixed-parameter tractability of this problem is a long-standing open question in the area of Parameterized Complexity. We resolve this open question by proposing an algorithm which solves this problem in @math and thus we show that this problem is fixed-parameter tractable.
The parameterized MAX-SAT problem (a complementary problem to the one considered in the present paper) where the goal is to satisfy at least @math clauses of arbitrary sizes received a considerable attention from the researchers resulted in a series of improvements of the worst-case upper bound on the runtime of this problem. Currently the best algorithm is given in @cite_12 and solves this problem in @math , where @math is the size of the given formula.
@cite_12
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We present an exact algorithm that decides, for every fixed r ≥ 2 in time O(m) + 2O(k2) whether a given set of m clauses of size r admits a truth assignment that satisfies at least ((2r - 1)m + k) 2r clauses. Thus Max-r-Sat is fixed-parameter tractable when parameterized by the number of satisfied clauses above the tight lower bound (1--2-r)m. This solves an open problem of Mahajan, Raman and Sikdar (J. Comput. System Sci., 75, 2009). Our algorithm is based on a polynomial-time data reduction procedure that reduces a problem instance to an equivalent algebraically represented problem with O(k2) variables. This is done by representing the instance as an appropriate polynomial, and by applying a probabilistic argument combined with some simple tools from Harmonic analysis to show that if the polynomial cannot be reduced to one of size O(k2), then there is a truth assignment satisfying the required number of clauses. Combining another probabilistic argument with tools from graph matching theory and signed graphs, we show that if an instance of Max-2-Sat with m clauses has at least 3k variables after application of certain polynomial time reduction rules to it, then there is a truth assignment that satisfies at least (3m + k) 4 clauses. We also outline how the fixed-parameter tractability result on Max-r-Sat can be extended to a family of Boolean Constraint Satisfaction Problems. In the (d,n) group testing problem n items have to be identified as either good or defective and the number of defective items is known to be d. A test on an arbitrary group (subset) of items reveals either that all items in the group are good or that at least one of the items is defective, but not how many or which items are defective. We present a new algorithm which in the worst case needs less than @math tests more than the information lower bound @math for n d≥2. For n d≥38, the difference decreases to less than @math tests. For d≥10, this is a considerable improvement over the d−1 additional tests given for the best previously known algorithm by Hwang. We conjecture that the behaviour for large n and d of the difference is optimal for @math . This implies that the @math tests per defective given in the bound above are the best possible. Random constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) are known to exhibit threshold phenomena: given a uniformly random instance of a CSP with @math variables and @math clauses, there is a value of @math beyond which the CSP will be unsatisfiable with high probability. Strong refutation is the problem of certifying that no variable assignment satisfies more than a constant fraction of clauses; this is the natural algorithmic problem in the unsatisfiable regime (when @math ). Intuitively, strong refutation should become easier as the clause density @math grows, because the contradictions introduced by the random clauses become more locally apparent. For CSPs such as @math -SAT and @math -XOR, there is a long-standing gap between the clause density at which efficient strong refutation algorithms are known, @math , and the clause density at which instances become unsatisfiable with high probability, @math . In this paper, we give spectral and sum-of-squares algorithms for strongly refuting random @math -XOR instances with clause density @math in time @math or in @math rounds of the sum-of-squares hierarchy, for any @math and any integer @math . Our algorithms provide a smooth transition between the clause density at which polynomial-time algorithms are known at @math , and brute-force refutation at the satisfiability threshold when @math . We also leverage our @math -XOR results to obtain strong refutation algorithms for SAT (or any other Boolean CSP) at similar clause densities. Our algorithms match the known sum-of-squares lower bounds due to Grigoriev and Schonebeck, up to logarithmic factors. Additionally, we extend our techniques to give new results for certifying upper bounds on the injective tensor norm of random tensors. Let @math be a uniformly distributed random @math -SAT formula with @math variables and @math clauses. For clauses variables ratio @math the formula @math is satisfiable with high probability. However, no efficient algorithm is known to provably find a satisfying assignment beyond @math with a non-vanishing probability. Non-rigorous statistical mechanics work on @math -CNF led to the development of a new efficient "message passing algorithm" called [M ', Science 2002]. Experiments conducted for @math suggest that the algorithm finds satisfying assignments close to @math . However, in the present paper we prove that the basic version of Survey Propagation Guided Decimation fails to solve random @math -SAT formulas efficiently already for @math with @math almost a factor @math below @math . We consider linear regression in the high-dimensional regime where the number of observations @math is smaller than the number of parameters @math . A very successful approach in this setting uses @math -penalized least squares (a.k.a. the Lasso) to search for a subset of @math parameters that best explain the data, while setting the other parameters to zero. Considerable amount of work has been devoted to characterizing the estimation and model selection problems within this approach. In this paper we consider instead the fundamental, but far less understood, question of . More precisely, we address the problem of computing p-values for single regression coefficients. On one hand, we develop a general upper bound on the minimax power of tests with a given significance level. On the other, we prove that this upper bound is (nearly) achievable through a practical procedure in the case of random design matrices with independent entries. Our approach is based on a debiasing of the Lasso estimator. The analysis builds on a rigorous characterization of the asymptotic distribution of the Lasso estimator and its debiased version. Our result holds for optimal sample size, i.e., when @math is at least on the order of @math . We generalize our approach to random design matrices with i.i.d. Gaussian rows @math . In this case we prove that a similar distributional characterization (termed standard distributional limit') holds for @math much larger than @math . Finally, we show that for optimal sample size, @math being at least of order @math , the standard distributional limit for general Gaussian designs can be derived from the replica heuristics in statistical physics. Abstract In this paper, we present improved exact and parameterized algorithms for the maximum satisfiability problem. In particular, we give an algorithm that computes a truth assignment for a boolean formula F satisfying the maximum number of clauses in time O(1.3247 m | F |), where m is the number of clauses in F , and | F | is the sum of the number of literals appearing in each clause in F . Moreover, given a parameter k , we give an O(1.3695 k +| F |) parameterized algorithm that decides whether a truth assignment for F satisfying at least k clauses exists. Both algorithms improve the previous best algorithms by Bansal and Raman for the problem. Parameterized runtime analysis seeks to understand the influence of problem structure on algorithmic runtime. In this paper, we contribute to the theoretical understanding of evolutionary algorithms and carry out a parameterized analysis of evolutionary algorithms for the Euclidean traveling salesperson problem (Euclidean TSP). We investigate the structural properties in TSP instances that influence the optimization process of evolutionary algorithms and use this information to bound the runtime of simple evolutionary algorithms. Our analysis studies the runtime in dependence of the number of inner points @math and shows that @math evolutionary algorithms solve the Euclidean TSP in expected time @math where @math is a function of the minimum angle @math between any three points. Finally, our analysis provides insights into designing a mutation operator that improves the upper bound on expected runtime. We show that a mixed mutation strategy that incorporates both 2-opt moves and permutation jumps results in an upper bound of @math for the @math EA. Karpinski and Nekrich (2008) introduced the problem of parameterized range majority, which asks to preprocess a string of length @math such that, given the endpoints of a range, one can quickly find all the distinct elements whose relative frequencies in that range are more than a threshold @math . Subsequent authors have reduced their time and space bounds such that, when @math is given at preprocessing time, we need either @math space and optimal @math query time or linear space and @math query time, where @math is the alphabet size. In this paper we give the first linear-space solution with optimal @math query time. For the case when @math is given at query time, we significantly improve previous bounds, achieving either @math space and optimal @math query time or compressed space and @math query time. Along the way, we consider the complementary problem of parameterized range minority that was recently introduced by (2012), who achieved linear space and @math query time even for variable @math . We improve their solution to use either nearly optimally compressed space with no slowdown, or optimally compressed space with nearly no slowdown. Some of our intermediate results, such as density-sensitive query time for one-dimensional range counting, may be of independent interest. In this paper we consider the problem of efficiently computing @math -sketches for the Laplacian and its pseudoinverse. Given a Laplacian and an error tolerance @math , we seek to construct a function @math such that for any vector @math (chosen obliviously from @math ), with high probability @math where @math is either the Laplacian or its pseudoinverse. Our goal is to construct such a sketch @math efficiently and to store it in the least space possible. We provide nearly-linear time algorithms that, when given a Laplacian matrix @math and an error tolerance @math , produce @math -size sketches of both @math and its pseudoinverse. Our algorithms improve upon the previous best sketch size of @math for sketching the Laplacian form by (2015) and @math for sketching the Laplacian pseudoinverse by Batson, Spielman, and Srivastava (2008). Furthermore we show how to compute all-pairs effective resistances from @math size sketch in @math time. This improves upon the previous best running time of @math by Spielman and Srivastava (2008). We establish a lower bound for the formula size of quolynomials over arbitrary fields. Our basic formula operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The proof is based on Neciporuk’s [Soviet Math. Doklady, 7 (1966), pp. 999–1000] lower bound for Boolean functions and uses formal power series. This result immediately yields a lower bound for the formula size of rational functions over infinite fields. We also show how to adapt Neciporuk’s method to rational functions over finite fields. These results are then used to show that, over any field, the @math determinant function has formula size at least @math . We thus have an algebraic analogue to the @math lower bound for the Boolean determinant due to Kloss [Soviet Math. Doklady, 7 (1966), pp. 1537–1540]. Let @math be a uniformly distributed random @math -SAT formula with @math variables and @math clauses. We present a polynomial time algorithm that finds a satisfying assignment of @math with high probability for constraint densities @math , where @math . Previously no efficient algorithm was known to find satisfying assignments with a nonvanishing probability beyond @math [A. Frieze and S. Suen, J. Algorithms, 20 (1996), pp. 312-355]. Experiments on solvingr-SAT random formulae have provided evidence of a satisfiability threshold phenomenon with respect to the ratio of the number of clauses to the number of variables of formulae. Presently, only the threshold of 2-SAT formulae has been proved to exist and has been computed to be equal to 1. For 3-SAT formulae and more generally forr-SAT formulae, lower and upper bounds of the threshold have been established. The best established bounds concern 3-SAT. For an observed threshold of about 4.25, the best lower bound is 3.003 and the best upper bound 4.76. In this paper we establish a general upper bound of the threshold forr-SAT formulae giving a value for 3-SAT of 4.64, significantly improving the previous best upper bound. For this we have defined a more restrictive structure than a satisfying truth assignment for characterizing the satisfiability of a SAT formula which we have called negatively prime solution (NPS). By merely applying the first moment method to negatively prime solutions of a randomr-SAT formula we obtain our bound. We consider the problem of broadcasting in an unknown radio network modeled as a directed graph @math , where @math . In unknown networks, every node knows only its own label, while it is unaware of any other parameter of the network, including its neighborhood and even any upper bound on the number of nodes. We show an @math upper bound on the time complexity of deterministic broadcasting. This is an improvement over the currently best upper bound @math for arbitrary networks, thus shrinking exponentially the existing gap between the lower bound @math and the upper bound from @math to @math . Multiple objects in the plane are called pseudodisks if the boundaries of any two of them intersect transversely at most twice. Given a set of @math (possibly intersecting) convex pseudodisks of @math complexity each and two points @math and @math in the plane, we present an efficient algorithm for computing a shortest @math -to- @math path avoiding the pseudodisks. After the union of the pseudodisks is computed, which can be done in @math randomized time or @math deterministic time, our algorithm runs in @math deterministic time, where @math is the size of the extended visibility graph of the union of the pseudodisks. Note that @math in the worst case. In over two decades, the previously best algorithms for this problem have not improved on the bound of @math time, even when all the pseudodisks are pairwise disjoint disks. Our technique is also applicable to a motion planning problem of finding a shortest path to translate a convex object in the plane from one location to anot... Given an undirected graph G = (V ,E ), the density of a subgraph on vertex set S is defined as @math , where E (S ) is the set of edges in the subgraph induced by nodes in S . Finding subgraphs of maximum density is a very well studied problem. One can also generalize this notion to directed graphs. For a directed graph one notion of density given by Kannan and Vinay [12] is as follows: given subsets S and T of vertices, the density of the subgraph is @math , where E (S ,T ) is the set of edges going from S to T . Without any size constraints, a subgraph of maximum density can be found in polynomial time. When we require the subgraph to have a specified size, the problem of finding a maximum density subgraph becomes NP -hard. In this paper we focus on developing fast polynomial time algorithms for several variations of dense subgraph problems for both directed and undirected graphs. When there is no size bound, we extend the flow based technique for obtaining a densest subgraph in directed graphs and also give a linear time 2-approximation algorithm for it. When a size lower bound is specified for both directed and undirected cases, we show that the problem is NP-complete and give fast algorithms to find subgraphs within a factor 2 of the optimum density. We also show that solving the densest subgraph problem with an upper bound on size is as hard as solving the problem with an exact size constraint, within a constant factor. Given @math wireless transceivers located in a plane, a fundamental problem in wireless communications is to construct a strongly connected digraph on them such that the constituent links can be scheduled in fewest possible time slots, assuming the SINR model of interference. In this paper, we provide an algorithm that connects an arbitrary point set in @math slots, improving on the previous best bound of @math due to Moscibroda. This is complemented with a super-constant lower bound on our approach to connectivity. An important feature is that the algorithms allow for bi-directional (half-duplex) communication. One implication of this result is an improved bound of @math on the worst-case capacity of wireless networks, matching the best bound known for the extensively studied average-case. We explore the utility of oblivious power assignments, and show that essentially all such assignments result in a worst case bound of @math slots for connectivity. This rules out a recent claim of a @math bound using oblivious power. On the other hand, using our result we show that @math slots suffice, where @math is the ratio between the largest and the smallest links in a minimum spanning tree of the points. Our results extend to the related problem of minimum latency aggregation scheduling, where we show that aggregation scheduling with @math latency is possible, improving upon the previous best known latency of @math . We also initiate the study of network design problems in the SINR model beyond strong connectivity, obtaining similar bounds for biconnected and @math -edge connected structures. We design new polynomials for representing threshold functions in three different regimes: probabilistic polynomials of low degree, which need far less randomness than previous constructions, polynomial threshold functions (PTFs) with "nice" threshold behavior and degree almost as low as the probabilistic polynomials, and a new notion of probabilistic PTFs where we combine the above techniques to achieve even lower degree with similar "nice" threshold behavior. Utilizing these polynomial constructions, we design faster algorithms for a variety of problems: @math Offline Hamming Nearest (and Furthest) Neighbors: Given @math red and @math blue points in @math -dimensional Hamming space for @math , we can find an (exact) nearest (or furthest) blue neighbor for every red point in randomized time @math or deterministic time @math . These also lead to faster MAX-SAT algorithms for sparse CNFs. @math Offline Approximate Nearest (and Furthest) Neighbors: Given @math red and @math blue points in @math -dimensional @math or Euclidean space, we can find a @math -approximate nearest (or furthest) blue neighbor for each red point in randomized time near @math . @math SAT Algorithms and Lower Bounds for Circuits With Linear Threshold Functions: We give a satisfiability algorithm for @math circuits with a subquadratic number of linear threshold gates on the bottom layer, and a subexponential number of gates on the other layers, that runs in deterministic @math time. This also implies new circuit lower bounds for threshold circuits. We also give a randomized @math -time SAT algorithm for subexponential-size @math circuits, where the top @math gate and middle @math gates have @math fan-in. Given an undirected @math -node unweighted graph @math , a spanner with stretch function @math is a subgraph @math such that, if two nodes are at distance @math in @math , then they are at distance at most @math in @math . Spanners are very well studied in the literature. The typical goal is to construct the sparsest possible spanner for a given stretch function. In this paper we study pairwise spanners, where we require to approximate the @math - @math distance only for pairs @math in a given set @math . Such @math -spanners were studied before [Coppersmith,Elkin'05] only in the special case that @math is the identity function, i.e. distances between relevant pairs must be preserved exactly (a.k.a. pairwise preservers). Here we present pairwise spanners which are at the same time sparser than the best known preservers (on the same @math ) and of the best known spanners (with the same @math ). In more detail, for arbitrary @math , we show that there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . Alternatively, for any @math , there exists a @math -spanner of size @math with @math . We also consider the relevant special case that there is a critical set of nodes @math , and we wish to approximate either the distances within nodes in @math or from nodes in @math to any other node. We show that there exists an @math -spanner of size @math with @math , and an @math -spanner of size @math with @math . All the mentioned pairwise spanners can be constructed in polynomial time. We consider online algorithms for the generalized caching problem. Here we are given a cache of size @math and pages with arbitrary sizes and fetching costs. Given a request sequence of pages, the goal is to minimize the total cost of fetching the pages into the cache. Our main result is an online algorithm with competitive ratio @math , which gives the first @math competitive algorithm for the problem. We also give improved @math -competitive algorithms for the special cases of the bit model and fault model, improving upon the previous @math guarantees due to Irani [Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 1997, pp. 701-710]. Our algorithms are based on an extension of the online primal-dual framework introduced by Buchbinder and Naor [Math. Oper. Res., 34 (2009), pp. 270-286] and involve two steps. First, we obtain an @math -competitive fractional algorithm based on solving online an LP formulation strengthened with exponentially many knapsack cover constraints. Second, we design a suitable online rounding procedure to convert this online fractional algorithm into a randomized algorithm. Our techniques provide a unified framework for caching algorithms and are substantially simpler than those previously used. We present a randomised distributed maximal independent set (MIS) algorithm for arbitrary graphs of size @math that halts in time @math with probability @math , each message containing @math bit: thus its bit complexity per channel is @math (the bit complexity is the number of bits we need to solve a distributed task, it measures the communication complexity). We assume that the graph is anonymous: unique identities are not available to distinguish the processes; we only assume that each vertex distinguishes between its neighbours by locally known channel names. Furthermore we do not assume that the size (or an upper bound on the size) of the graph is known. This algorithm is optimal (modulo a multiplicative constant) for the bit complexity and improves the best previous randomised distributed MIS algorithms (deduced from the randomised PRAM algorithm due to Luby) for general graphs which is @math per channel (it halts in time @math and the size of each message is @math ). This result is based on a powerful and general technique for converting unrealistic exchanges of messages containing real numbers drawn at random on each vertex of a network into exchanges of bits. Then we consider a natural question: what is the impact of a vertex inclusion in the MIS on distant vertices? We prove that this impact vanishes rapidly as the distance grows for bounded-degree vertices. We provide a counter-example that shows this result does not hold in general. We prove also that these results remain valid for Luby's algorithm presented by Lynch and by Wattenhofer. This question remains open for the variant given by Peleg.