The spectacular success of Bitcoin and Blockchain Technology in recent years has provided enough evidence that a widespread adoption of a common cryptocurrency system is not merely a distant vision, but a scenario that might come true in the near future. However, the presence of Bitcoin's obvious shortcomings such as excessive electricity consumption, unsatisfying transaction throughput, and large validation time (latency) makes it clear that a new, more efficient system is needed.

Maximum entropy distributions with discrete support in $m$ dimensions arise in machine learning, statistics, information theory, and theoretical computer science. While structural and computational properties of max-entropy distributions have been extensively studied, basic questions such as: Do max-entropy distributions over a large support (e.g., $2^m$) with a specified marginal vector have succinct descriptions (polynomial-size in the input description)? and: Are entropy maximizing distributions “stable” under the perturbation of the marginal vector? have resisted a rigorous resolution. Here we show that these questions are related and resolve both of them. Our main result shows a ${\rm poly}(m, \log 1/\varepsilon)$ bound on the bit complexity of $\varepsilon$-optimal dual solutions to the maximum entropy convex program – for very general support sets and with no restriction on the marginal vector. Applications of this result include polynomial time algorithms to compute max-entropy distributions over several new and old polytopes for any marginal vector in a unified manner, a polynomial time algorithm to compute the Brascamp-Lieb constant in the rank-1 case. The proof of this result allows us to show that changing the marginal vector by $\delta$ changes the max-entropy distribution in the total variation distance roughly by a factor of ${\rm poly}(m, \log 1/\delta)\sqrt{\delta}$ – even when the size of the support set is exponential. Together, our results put max-entropy distributions on a mathematically sound footing – these distributions are robust and computationally feasible models for data.

Ranking algorithms are deployed widely to order a set of items in applications such as search engines, news feeds, and recommendation systems. Recent studies, however, have shown that, left unchecked, the output of ranking algorithms can result in decreased diversity in the type of content presented, promote stereotypes, and polarize opinions. In order to address such issues, we study the following variant of the traditional ranking problem when, in addition, there are fairness or diversity constraints. Given a collection of items along with 1) the value of placing an item in a particular position in the ranking, 2) the collection of sensitive attributes (such as gender, race, political opinion) of each item and 3) a collection of constraints that, for each k, bound the number of items with each attribute that are allowed to appear in the top k positions of the ranking, the goal is to output a ranking that maximizes the value with respect to the original rank quality metric while respecting the constraints. This problem encapsulates various well-studied problems related to bipartite and hypergraph matching as special cases and turns out to be hard to approximate even with simple constraints. Our main technical contributions are fast exact and approximation algorithms along with complementary hardness results that, together, come close to settling the approximability of this constrained ranking maximization problem. Unlike prior work on the constrained matching problems, our algorithm runs in linear time, even when the number of constraints is large, its approximation ratio does not depend on the number of constraints, and it produces solutions with small constraint violations. Our results rely on insights about the constrained matching problem when the objective satisfies properties that appear in common ranking metrics such as Discounted Cumulative Gain, Spearman's rho or Bradley-Terry.

Sampling methods that choose a subset of the data proportional to its diversity in the feature space are popular for data summarization. However, recent studies have noted the occurrence of bias {–} e.g., under or over representation of a particular gender or ethnicity {–} in such data summarization methods. In this paper we initiate a study of the problem of outputting a diverse and fair summary of a given dataset. We work with a well-studied determinantal measure of diversity and corresponding distributions (DPPs) and present a framework that allows us to incorporate a general class of fairness constraints into such distributions. Designing efficient algorithms to sample from these constrained determinantal distributions, however, suffers from a complexity barrier; we present a fast sampler that is provably good when the input vectors satisfy a natural property. Our empirical results on both real-world and synthetic datasets show that the diversity of the samples produced by adding fairness constraints is not too far from the unconstrained case.

Determinantal Point Processes (DPPs) are probabilistic models that arise in quantum physics and random matrix theory and have recently found numerous applications in theoretical computer science and machine learning. DPPs define probability distributions over subsets of a given ground set, they exhibit interesting properties such as negative correlation, and, unlike other models of negative correlation such as Markov random fields, have efficient algorithms for sampling. When applied to kernel methods in machine learning, DPPs favor subsets of the given data with more diverse features. However, many real-world applications require efficient algorithms to sample from DPPs with additional constraints on the sampled subset, e.g., partition or matroid constraints that are important from the viewpoint of ensuring priors, resource or fairness constraints on the sampled subset. Whether one can efficiently sample from DPPs in such constrained settings is an important problem that was first raised in a survey of DPPs for machine learning by Kulesza and Taskar and studied in some recent works. The main contribution of this paper is the first resolution of the complexity of sampling from DPPs with constraints. On the one hand, we give exact efficient algorithms for sampling from constrained DPPs when the description of the constraints is in unary; this includes special cases of practical importance such as a small number of partition, knapsack or budget constraints. On the other hand, we prove that when the constraints are specified in binary, this problem is #P-hard via a reduction from the problem of computing mixed discriminants; implying that it may be unlikely that there is an FPRAS. Technically, our algorithmic result benefits from viewing the constrained sampling problem via the lens of polynomials and we obtain our complexity results by providing an equivalence between computing mixed discriminants and sampling from partition constrained DPPs. As a consequence, we obtain a few corollaries of independent interest: 1) An algorithm to count, sample (and, hence, optimize) over the base polytope of regular matroids when there are additional (succinct) budget constraints and, 2) An algorithm to evaluate and compute mixed characteristic polynomials, that played a central role in the resolution of the Kadison-Singer problem, for certain special cases.

Several fundamental problems that arise in optimization and computer science can be cast as follows: Given vectors v1, ..., vm∈ ℝdand a constraint family B ⊆ 2[m], find a set S ∈ B that maximizes the squared volume of the simplex spanned by the vectors in S. A motivating example is the ubiquitous data-summarization problem in machine learning and information retrieval where one is given a collection of feature vectors that represent data such as documents or images. The volume of a collection of vectors is used as a measure of their diversity, and partition or matroid constraints over [m] are imposed in order to ensure resource or fairness constraints. Even with a simple cardinality constraint (B = (r[m])), the r problem becomes NP-hard and has received much attention starting with a result by Khachiyan [1] who gave an rO(r)approximation algorithm for this problem. Recently, Nikolov and Singh [2] presented a convex program and showed how it can be used to estimate the value of the most diverse set when there are multiple cardinality constraints (i.e., when B corresponds to a partition matroid). Their proof of the integrality gap of the convex program relied on an inequality by Gurvits [3], and was recently extended to regular matroids [4], [5]. The question of whether these estimation algorithms can be converted into the more useful approximation algorithms - that also output a set - remained open. The main contribution of this paper is to give the first approximation algorithms for both partition and regular matroids. We present novel formulations for the subdeterminant maximization problem for these matroids; this reduces them to the problem of finding a point that maximizes the absolute value of a nonconvex function over a Cartesian product of probability simplices. The technical core of our results is a new anti-concentration inequality for dependent random variables that arise from these functions which allows us to relate the optimal value of these nonconvex functions to their value at a random point. Unlike prior work on the constrained subdeterminant maximization problem, our proofs do not rely on real-stability or convexity and could be of independent interest both in algorithms and complexity where anti-concentration phenomena has recently been deployed.

Several fundamental optimization and counting problems arising in computer science, mathematics and physics can be reduced to one of the following computational tasks involving polynomials and set systems: given an oracle access to an m-variate real polynomial g and to a family of (multi-)subsets ℬ of [m], (1) compute the sum of coefficients of monomials in g corresponding to all the sets that appear in B(1), or find S ε ℬ such that the monomial in g corresponding to S has the largest coefficient in g. Special cases of these problems, such as computing permanents and mixed discriminants, sampling from determinantal point processes, and maximizing sub-determinants with combinatorial constraints have been topics of much recent interest in theoretical computer science.

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 the last few years, there has been a significant interest in the computational abilities of Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold). This arose from a remarkable experiment which showed that this organism can compute shortest paths in a maze [10]. Subsequently, the workings of Physarum were mathematically modeled as a dynamical system and algorithms inspired by this model were proposed to solve several graph problems: shortest paths, flows, and linear programs to name a few. Indeed, computer scientists have initiated a rigorous study of these dynamics and a first step towards this was taken by [1,2] who proved that the Physarum dynamics for the shortest path problem are efficient (when edge-lengths are polynomially bounded). In this paper, we take this further: we prove that the discrete time Physarum-dynamics can also efficiently solve the uncapacitated mincost flow problems on undirected and directed graphs; problems that are non-trivial generalizations of shortest path. This raises the tantalizing possibility that nature, via evolution, developed algorithms that efficiently solve some of the most complex computational problems, about a billion years before we did.

We present a new algorithm for generating a uniformly random spanning tree in an undirected graph. Our algorithm samples such a tree in expected time. This improves over the best previously known bound of , O(nω)) − that follows from the work of Kelner and Madry [FOCS'09] and of Colbourn et al. [J. Algorithms'96] – whenever the input graph is sufficiently sparse. At a high level, our result stems from carefully exploiting the interplay of random spanning trees, random walks, and the notion of effective resistance, as well as from devising a way to algorithmically relate these concepts to the combinatorial structure of the graph. This involves, in particular, establishing a new connection between the effective resistance metric and the cut structure of the underlying graph.