This paper considers using predictions in the context of the online Joint Replenishment Problem with Deadlines (JRP-D). Prior work includes asymptotically optimal competitive ratios of $O(1)$ for the clairvoyant setting and $O(\sqrt{n})$ of the nonclairvoyant setting, where $n$ is the number of items. The goal of this paper is to significantly reduce the competitive ratio for the nonclairvoyant case by leveraging predictions: when a request arrives, the true deadline of the request is not revealed, but the algorithm is given a predicted deadline. The main result is an algorithm whose competitive ratio is $O(\min(η^{1/3}\log^{2/3}(n), \sqrtη, \sqrt{n}))$, where $n$ is the number of item types and $η\leq n^2$ quantifies how flawed the predictions are in terms of the number of ``instantaneous item inversions.'' Thus, the algorithm is robust, i.e., it is never worse than the nonclairvoyant solution, and it is consistent, i.e., if the predictions exhibit no inversions, then the algorithm behaves similarly to the clairvoyant algorithm. Moreover, if the error is not too large, specifically $η< o(n^{3/2}/\log^2(n))$, then the algorithm obtains an asymptotically better competitive ratio than the nonclairvoyant algorithm. We also show that all deterministic algorithms falling in a certain reasonable class of algorithms have a competitive ratio of $Ω(η^{1/3})$, so this algorithm is nearly the best possible with respect to this error metric.

The Joint Replenishment Problem (JRP) is a classical inventory management problem, that aims to model the trade-off between coordinating orders for multiple commodities (and their cost) with holding costs incurred by meeting demand in advance. Recently, Moseley, Niaparast and Ravi introduced a natural online generalization of the JRP in which inventory corresponding to demands may be replenished late, for a delay cost, or early, in which case there is a holding cost associated with storing it until the desired service time. They established that when the holding and delay costs are monotone and uniform across demands, there is a 30-competitive algorithm that employs a greedy strategy and a dual-fitting based analysis; notably, they left relaxing the uniformity assumption as an open problem. This assumption is a significant limitation, and in fact, remarkable from the perspective that most online problems with only delay costs do not require uniformity, only monotonicity.

We analyse the computational complexity of two types of partial satisfaction planning problems, namely, over-subscription planning and net-benefit planning. Partial satisfaction planning seeks to maximise the rewards, or net-benefit between the rewards and costs, that can be obtained by achieving a set of (candidate) goals, generally under a cost budget. In this paper, we assume that the cost budget is polynomially bounded with respect to the number of atoms. In contrast to previous works on complexity analysis, we view partial satisfaction planning as optimisation tasks instead of decision ones. Accordingly, we classify over-subscription and net-benefit planning problems in classes within the optimisation complexity framework. Let L be the size of the partial satisfaction planning instance, we first show that both optimisation problems are OptP[LO(1)]-complete. We then prove that while over-subscription planning becomes OptP[O(log L)]-complete under uniform goal rewards and uniform action costs, the complexity of net-benefit planning remains unchanged. Our results show that the relative values of rewards and costs may impact the computational complexity of partial satisfaction planning, and that an optimisation perspective can reveal differences that may otherwise be lost in their decision formulations. In addition, an optimisation complexity analysis can provide insights on approximation properties of these problems.

Local Computation Algorithms (LCA), as introduced by Rubinfeld, Tamir, Vardi, and Xie (2011), are a type of ultra-efficient algorithms which, given access to a (large) input for a given computational task, are required to provide fast query access to a consistent output solution, without maintaining a state between queries. This paradigm of computation in particular allows for hugely distributed algorithms, where independent instances of a given LCA provide consistent access to a common output solution. We study the Knapsack Problem under LCA model. We first establish strong impossibility results, ruling out the existence of any non-trivial LCA for Knapsack as several of its relaxations. We then show how equipping the LCA with additional access to the Knapsack instance, namely, weighted item sampling, allows one to circumvent these impossibility results, and obtain sublinear-time and query LCAs. Our positive result draws on a connection to the recent notion of reproducibility for learning algorithms (Impagliazzo, Lei, Pitassi, and Sorrell, 2022), a connection we believe to be of independent interest for the design of LCAs.

In vertex recoloring, we are given $n$ vertices with their initial coloring, and edges arrive in an online fashion. The algorithm must maintain a valid coloring by recoloring vertices, at a cost. The problem abstracts a scenario of job placement in machines (possibly in the cloud), where vertices represent jobs, colors represent machines, and edges represent ``anti affinity'' (disengagement) constraints. Online recoloring is a hard problem. One family of instances which is fairly well-understood is bipartite graphs, in which two colors are sufficient to satisfy all constraints. In this case it is known that the competitive ratio of vertex recoloring is $Θ(\log n)$. We propose a generalization of the problem, which allows using additional colors (possibly at a higher cost), to improve overall performance. We analyze the simple case of bipartite graphs of bounded largest \emph{bond} (a bond of a connected graph is an edge-cut that partitions the graph into two connected components). First, we propose two algorithms. One exhibits a trade-off for the uniform-cost case: given $Ω(\logβ)\le c\le O(\log n)$ colors, the algorithm guarantees that its cost is at most $O(\frac{\log n}{c})$ times the optimal offline cost for two colors, where $n$ is the number of vertices and $β$ is the size of the largest bond. The other algorithm is for the case where the additional colors come at a higher cost, $D>1$: given $Δ$ additional colors, where $Δ$ is the maximum degree in the graph, the algorithm guarantees $O(\log D)$ competitiveness. As to lower bounds, we show that if the cost of the extra colors is $D>1$, no (randomized) algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio of $o(\log D)$. We also show that for bipartite graphs of unbounded bond size, any deterministic online algorithm has competitive ratio $Ω(\min(D,\log n))$.

We consider the Max Unique Coverage problem, including applications to the data stream model. The input is a universe of $n$ elements, a collection of $m$ subsets of this universe, and a cardinality constraint, $k$. The goal is to select a subcollection of at most $k$ sets that maximizes unique coverage, i.e, the number of elements contained in exactly one of the selected sets. The Max Unique Coverage problem has applications in wireless networks, radio broadcast, and envy-free pricing. Our first main result is a fixed-parameter tractable approximation scheme (FPT-AS) for Max Unique Coverage, parameterized by $k$ and the maximum element frequency, $r$, which can be implemented on a data stream. Our FPT-AS finds a $(1-ε)$-approximation while maintaining a kernel of size $\tilde{O}(k r/ε)$, which can be combined with subsampling to use $\tilde{O}(k^2 r / ε^3)$ space overall. This significantly improves on the previous-best FPT-AS with the same approximation, but a kernel of size $\tilde{O}(k^2 r / ε^2)$. In order to achieve our result, we show upper bounds on the ratio of a collection's coverage to the unique coverage of a maximizing subcollection; this is by constructing explicit algorithms that find a subcollection with unique coverage at least a logarithmic ratio of the collection's coverage. We complement our algorithms with our second main result, showing that $Ω(m / k^2)$ space is necessary to achieve a $(1.5 + o(1))/(\ln k - 1)$-approximation in the data stream. This dramatically improves the previous-best lower bound showing that $Ω(m / k^2)$ is necessary to achieve better than a $e^{-1+1/k}$-approximation.

Clairvoyant network design with deadlines or delay has been studied extensively, culminating in an O(log n)-competitive general framework, where n is the number of possible request types (Azar and Touitou, FOCS 2020). In the nonclairvoyant setting, the problem becomes much harder, as Ω(√n) lower bounds are known for certain problems (Azar et al., STOC 2017). However, no frameworks are known for the nonclairvoyant setting, and previous work focuses only on specific problems, e.g., multilevel aggregation (Le et al., SODA 2023). In this paper, we present the first nonclairvoyant frameworks for network design with deadlines or delay. These frameworks are nearly optimal: their competitive ratio is Õ(√n), which matches known lower bounds up to logarithmic factors.

In this paper, we study the Dynamic Parameterized Subset Sampling (DPSS) problem in the Word RAM model. In DPSS, the input is a set, S , of n items, where each item, x , has a non-negative integer weight, w(x). Given a pair of query parameters, (α, β), each of which is a non-negative rational number, a parameterized subset sampling query on S seeks to return a subset T ⊆ S such that each item x∈ S is selected in T , independently, with probability p_x(α, β) which is the minimum between 1 and w(x) / (α \cdot W + β), where W is the total weight of the items in S . More specifically, the DPSS problem is defined in a dynamic setting, where the item set, S , can be updated with insertions of new items or deletions of existing items. Our first main result is an optimal algorithm for solving the DPSS problem, which achieves O(n) pre-processing time, O(1+μ_S(α,β)) expected time for each query parameterized by (α, β), given on-the-fly, and O(1) time for each update; here, μ_S(α,β) is the expected size of the query result. At all times, the worst-case space consumption of our algorithm is linear in the current number of items in S . Our second main contribution is a hardness result for the DPSS problem when the item weights are O(1)-word float numbers, rather than integers. Specifically, we reduce Integer Sorting to the deletion-only DPSS problem with float item weights. Our reduction shows that an optimal algorithm for deletion-only DPSS with float item weights (achieving all the same bounds as aforementioned) implies an algorithm for sorting N integers in O(N) expected time. The latter remains an important open problem. Moreover, a deletion-only DPSS algorithm which supports float item weights, with complexities worse, by at most a factor of o(√łog łog N), than the optimal counterparts, would already improve the current-best integer sorting algorithm [FOCS 2002]. Last but not least, a key technical ingredient for our first main result is a set of exact and efficient algorithms for generating Bernoulli (of certain forms) and Truncated Geometric random variates in O(1) expected time with O(n) worst-case space in the Word RAM model. Generating Bernoulli and geometric random variates efficiently is of great importance not only to sampling problems but also to encryption in cybersecurity. We believe that our new algorithms may be of independent interests for related research.

We initiate the study of online problems with set delay, where the delay cost at any given time is an arbitrary function of the set of pending requests. In particular, we study the online min-cost perfect matching with set delay (MPMD-Set) problem, which generalises the online min-cost perfect matching with delay (MPMD) problem introduced by Emek et al. (STOC 2016). In MPMD, m requests arrive over time in a metric space of n points. When a request arrives the algorithm must choose to either match or delay the request. The goal is to create a perfect matching of all requests while minimising the sum of distances between matched requests, and the total delay costs incurred by each of the requests. In contrast to previous work we study MPMD-Set in the non-clairvoyant setting, where the algorithm does not know the future delay costs. We first show no algorithm is competitive in n or m. We then study the natural special case of size-based delay where the delay is a non-decreasing function of the number of unmatched requests. Our main result is the first non-clairvoyant algorithms for online min-cost perfect matching with size-based delay that are competitive in terms of m. In fact, these are the first non-clairvoyant algorithms for any variant of MPMD. A key technical ingredient is an analog of the symmetric difference of matchings that may be useful for other special classes of set delay. Furthermore, we prove a lower bound of Ω(n) for any deterministic algorithm and Ω(log n) for any randomised algorithm. These lower bounds also hold for clairvoyant algorithms. Finally, we also give an m-competitive deterministic algorithm for uniform concave delays in the clairvoyant setting.

Most online problems with delay require clairvoyance, the future delay of a request is known upon its arrival, to achieve polylogarithmic competitiveness. An exception is Set Cover with Delay: Azar et al. (ESA 2020) gave a non-clairvoyant randomized algorithm with polylogarithmic competitive ratio. However, no non-trivial algorithms are known for other non-clairvoyant online problems with delay and it is also unclear if non-clairvoyance requires randomization. In this work, we make progress towards understanding the power of clairvoyance for online problems with delay by providing deterministic non-clairvoyant algorithms for Multi-Level Aggregation and Set Cover with Delay. Our main contribution is a deterministic -competitive algorithm for Multi-Level Aggregation, where D is the depth of the aggregation tree. For the special case of Joint Replenishment (D = 1), we give an lower bound against non-clairvoyant randomized algorithms. Thus, we get a tight characterization of the competitive ratio for non-clairvoyant Joint Replenishment. Finally, we show that clairvoyance is not required at all for Set Cover with Delay by derandomizing the algorithm of Azar et al. losing at most a constant factor in the competitiveness. Together with the above bounds, this also implies that randomization does not help in the non-clairvoyant setting.

Abstract Let $$P=\{p_0,\ldots ,p_{n-1}\}$$ P = { p 0 , … , p n - 1 } be a set of points in $${\mathbb R}^d$$ R d , modeling devices in a wireless network. A range assignment assigns a range $$r(p_i)$$ r ( p i ) to each point $$p_i\in P$$ p i ∈ P , thus inducing a directed communication graph $$\mathcal {G}_r$$ G r in which there is a directed edge $$(p_i,p_j)$$ ( p i , p j ) iff $${{\,\textrm{dist}\,}}(p_i, p_j) \leqslant r(p_i)$$ dist ( p i , p j ) ⩽ r ( p i ) , where $${{\,\textrm{dist}\,}}(p_i,p_j)$$ dist ( p i , p j ) denotes the distance between $$p_i$$ p i and $$p_j$$ p j . The range-assignment problem is to assign the transmission ranges such that $$\mathcal {G}_r$$ G r has a certain desirable property, while minimizing the cost of the assignment; here the cost is given by $$\sum _{p_i\in P} r(p_i)^{\alpha }$$ ∑ p i ∈ P r ( p i ) α , for some constant $$\alpha >1$$ α > 1 called the distance-power gradient. We introduce the online version of the range-assignment problem, where the points $$p_j$$ p j arrive one by one, and the range assignment has to be updated at each arrival. Following the standard in online algorithms, resources given out cannot be taken away—in our case this means that the transmission ranges will never decrease. The property we want to maintain is that $$\mathcal {G}_r$$ G r has a broadcast tree rooted at the first point

The active-time scheduling problem considers the problem of scheduling preemptible jobs with windows (release times and deadlines) on a parallel machine that can schedule up to g jobs during each timestep. The goal in the active-time problem is to minimize the number of active steps, i.e., timesteps in which at least one job is scheduled.

We initiate the theoretical study of Ext-TSP, a problem that originates in the area of profile-guided binary optimization. Given a graph $G=(V, E)$ with positive edge weights $w: E \rightarrow R^+$, and a non-increasing discount function $f(\cdot)$ such that $f(1) = 1$ and $f(i) = 0$ for $i > k$, for some parameter $k$ that is part of the problem definition. The problem is to sequence the vertices $V$ so as to maximize $\sum_{(u, v) \in E} f(|d_u - d_v|)\cdot w(u,v)$, where $d_v \in \{1, \ldots, |V| \}$ is the position of vertex~$v$ in the sequence. We show that \prob{Ext-TSP} is APX-hard to approximate in general and we give a $(k+1)$-approximation algorithm for general graphs and a PTAS for some sparse graph classes such as planar or treewidth-bounded graphs. Interestingly, the problem remains challenging even on very simple graph classes; indeed, there is no exact $n^{o(k)}$ time algorithm for trees unless the ETH fails. We complement this negative result with an exact $n^{O(k)}$ time algorithm for trees.

Let P = {p₀,…,p_{n-1}} be a set of points in ℝ^d, modeling devices in a wireless network. A range assignment assigns a range r(p_i) to each point p_i ∈ P, thus inducing a directed communication graph 𝒢_r in which there is a directed edge (p_i,p_j) iff dist(p_i, p_j) ⩽ r(p_i), where dist(p_i,p_j) denotes the distance between p_i and p_j. The range-assignment problem is to assign the transmission ranges such that 𝒢_r has a certain desirable property, while minimizing the cost of the assignment; here the cost is given by ∑_{p_i ∈ P} r(p_i)^α, for some constant α > 1 called the distance-power gradient. We introduce the online version of the range-assignment problem, where the points p_j arrive one by one, and the range assignment has to be updated at each arrival. Following the standard in online algorithms, resources given out cannot be taken away - in our case this means that the transmission ranges will never decrease. The property we want to maintain is that 𝒢_r has a broadcast tree rooted at the first point p₀. Our results include the following. - We prove that already in ℝ¹, a 1-competitive algorithm does not exist. In particular, for distance-power gradient α = 2 any online algorithm has competitive ratio at least 1.57. - For points in ℝ¹ and ℝ², we analyze two natural strategies for updating the range assignment upon the arrival of a new point p_j. The strategies do not change the assignment if p_j is already within range of an existing point, otherwise they increase the range of a single point, as follows: Nearest-Neighbor (NN) increases the range of NN(p_j), the nearest neighbor of p_j, to dist(p_j, NN(p_j)), and Cheapest Increase (CI) increases the range of the point p_i for which the resulting cost increase to be able to reach the new point p_j is minimal. We give lower and upper bounds on the competitive ratio of these strategies as a function of the distance-power gradient α. We also analyze the following variant of NN in ℝ² for α = 2: 2-Nearest-Neighbor (2-NN) increases the range of NN(p_j) to 2⋅ dist(p_j,NN(p_j)), - We generalize the problem to points in arbitrary metric spaces, where we present an O(log n)-competitive algorithm.

Probabilistic metric embedding into trees is a powerful technique for designing online algorithms. The standard approach is to embed the entire underlying metric into a tree metric and then solve the problem on the latter. The overhead in the competitive ratio depends on the expected distortion of the embedding, which is logarithmic in n, the size of the underlying metric. For many online applications, such as online network design problems, it is natural to ask if it is possible to construct such embeddings in an online fashion such that the distortion would be a polylogarithmic function of k, the number of terminals. Our first main contribution is answering this question negatively, exhibiting a lower bound of (log k log ɸ), where ɸ is the aspect ratio of the set of terminals, showing that a simple modification of the probabilistic embedding into trees of Bartal (FOCS 1996), which has expected distortion of O(log k log ɸ), is nearly-tight. Unfortunately, this may result in a very bad (polynomial) dependence in terms of k. Our second main contribution is a general framework for bypassing this limitation. We show that for a large class of online problems this online probabilistic embedding can still be used to devise an algorithm with O(min{log k log(kλ), log3 k}) overhead in the competitive ratio, where k is the current number of terminals, and λ is a measure of subadditivity of the cost function, which is at most r, the current number of requests. In particular, this implies the first algorithms with competitive ratio polylog(k) for online subadditive network design (buy-at-bulk network design being a special case), and polylog(k, r) for online group Steiner forest.

The Weighted Tree Augmentation problem (WTAP) is a fundamental problem in network design. In this paper, we consider this problem in the online setting. We are given an n-vertex spanning tree T and an additional set L of edges (called links) with costs. Then, terminal pairs arrive one-by-one and our task is to maintain a low-cost subset of links F such that every terminal pair that has arrived so far is 2-edge-connected in T cup F. This online problem was first studied by Gupta, Krishnaswamy and Ravi (SICOMP 2012) who used it as a subroutine for the online survivable network design problem. They gave a deterministic O(log^2 n)-competitive algorithm and showed an Omega(log n) lower bound on the competitive ratio of randomized algorithms. The case when T is a path is also interesting: it is exactly the online interval set cover problem, which also captures as a special case the parking permit problem studied by Meyerson (FOCS 2005). The contribution of this paper is to give tight results for online weighted tree and path augmentation problems. The main result of this work is a deterministic O(log n)-competitive algorithm for online WTAP, which is tight up to constant factors.

In the Convex Body Chasing problem, we are given an initial point v0 ∊ ℝd and an online sequence of n convex bodies F1, …, Fn. When we receive Fi, we are required to move inside Fi. Our goal is to minimize the total distance traveled. This fundamental online problem was first studied by Friedman and Linial (DCG 1993). They proved an lower bound on the competitive ratio, and conjectured that a competitive ratio depending only on d is possible. However, despite much interest in the problem, the conjecture remains wide open. We consider the setting in which the convex bodies are nested: Fi ⊃ … ⊃ Fn. The nested setting is closely related to extending the online LP framework of Buchbinder and Naor (ESA 2005) to arbitrary linear constraints. Moreover, this setting retains much of the difficulty of the general setting and captures an essential obstacle in resolving Friedman and Linial's conjecture. In this work, we give a f(d)-competitive algorithm for chasing nested convex bodies in ℝd.

We give a general approach for solving optimization problems on noisy minor free and bounded treewidth graphs, where a fraction of edges are adversarially corrupted. The noisy setting was first considered by Magen and Moharrami and they gave a (1 + ∊)-estimation algorithm for the independent set problem. Later, Chan and Har-Peled designed a local search algorithm that finds a (1 + ∊)-approximate independent set. However, nothing was known regarding other problems in the noisy setting. Our main contribution is a general LP-based framework that yields (1 + ∊)-approximation algorithms for noisy MAX-k-CSPs.

The online (uniform) buy-at-bulk network design problem asks us to design a network, where the edge-costs exhibit economy-of-scale. Previous approaches to this problem used tree-embeddings, giving us randomized algorithms. Moreover, the optimal results with a logarithmic competitive ratio requires the metric on which the network is being built to be known up-front; the competitive ratios then depend on the size of this metric (which could be much larger than the number of terminals that arrive). We consider the buy-at-bulk problem in the least restrictive model where the metric is not known in advance, but revealed in parts along with the demand points seeking connectivity arriving online. For the single sink buy-at-bulk problem, we give a deterministic online algorithm with competitive ratio that is logarithmic in k, the number of terminals that have arrived, matching the lower bound known even for the online Steiner tree problem. In the oblivious case when the buy-at-bulk function used to compute the edge-costs of the network is not known in advance (but is the same across all edges), we give a deterministic algorithm with competitive ratio polylogarithmic in k, the number of terminals. At the heart of our algorithms are optimal constructions for online Light Approximate Shortest-path Trees (LASTs) and spanners, and their variants. We give constructions that have optimal trade-offs in terms of cost and stretch. We also define and give constructions for a new notion of LASTs where the set of roots (in addition to the points) expands over time. We expect these techniques will find applications in other online network-design problems.

We develop a new approach for online network design and obtain improved competitive ratios for several problems. Our approach gives natural deterministic algorithms and simple analyses. At the heart of our work is a novel application of embeddings into hierarchically well-separated trees (HSTs) to the analysis of online network design algorithms — we charge the cost of the algorithm to the cost of the optimal solution on any HST embedding of the terminals. This analysis technique is widely applicable to many problems and gives a unified framework for online network design.

We study network design with a cost structure motivated by redundancy in data traffic. We are given a graph, g groups of terminals, and a universe of data packets. Each group of terminals desires a subset of the packets from its respective source. The cost of routing traffic on any edge in the network is proportional to the total size of the distinct packets that the edge carries. Our goal is to find a minimum cost routing. We focus on two settings. In the first, the collection of packet sets desired by source-sink pairs is laminar. For this setting, we present a primal-dual based 2-approximation, improving upon a logarithmic approximation due to Barman and Chawla (2012){BC12}. In the second setting, packet sets can have non-trivial intersection. We focus on the case where each packet is desired by either a single terminal group or by all of the groups. This setting does not admit an O(log^{{1}/{4} - gamma} g)-approximation for any constant gamma under a standard assumption; we present an O(log g)-approximation when the graph is unweighted. Our approximation for the second setting is based on a novel spanner-type construction in unweighted graphs that, given a collection of g vertex subsets, finds a subgraph of cost only a constant factor more than the minimum spanning tree of the graph, such that every subset in the collection has a Steiner tree in the subgraph of cost at most O(log g) that of its minimum Steiner tree in the original graph. We call such a subgraph a group spanner.