Related papers: Constructive Discrepancy Minimization by Walking o…
A result of Spencer states that every collection of $n$ sets over a universe of size $n$ has a coloring of the ground set with $\{-1,+1\}$ of discrepancy $O(\sqrt{n})$. A geometric generalization of this result was given by Gluskin (see…
Given a set system (V,S), V={1,...,n} and S={S1,...,Sm}, the minimum discrepancy problem is to find a 2-coloring of V, such that each set is colored as evenly as possible. In this paper we give the first polynomial time algorithms for…
A classical theorem of Spencer shows that any set system with n sets and n elements admits a coloring of discrepancy O(n^1/2). Recent exciting work of Bansal, Lovett and Meka shows that such colorings can be found in polynomial time. In…
In discrepancy minimization problems, we are given a family of sets $\mathcal{S} = \{S_1,\dots,S_m\}$, with each $S_i \in \mathcal{S}$ a subset of some universe $U = \{u_1,\dots,u_n\}$ of $n$ elements. The goal is to find a coloring $\chi :…
As the most powerful tool in discrepancy theory, the partial coloring method has wide applications in many problems including the Beck-Fiala problem and Spencer's celebrated result. Currently, there are two major algorithmic methods for the…
A well-known theorem of Spencer shows that any set system with $n$ sets over $n$ elements admits a coloring of discrepancy $O(\sqrt{n})$. While the original proof was non-constructive, recent progress brought polynomial time algorithms by…
Efficiently computing low discrepancy colorings of various set systems, has been studied extensively since the breakthrough work by Bansal (FOCS 2010), who gave the first polynomial time algorithms for several important settings, including…
A recent work by [Larsen, SODA 2023] introduced a faster combinatorial alternative to Bansal's SDP algorithm for finding a coloring $x \in \{-1, 1\}^n$ that approximately minimizes the discrepancy $\mathrm{disc}(A, x) := | A x |_{\infty}$…
We consider the problem of finding a low discrepancy coloring for sparse set systems where each element lies in at most $t$ sets. We give an algorithm that finds a coloring with discrepancy $O((t \log n \log s)^{1/2})$ where $s$ is the…
A celebrated theorem of Spencer states that for every set system $S_1,\dots, S_m \subseteq [n]$, there is a coloring of the ground set with $\{\pm 1\}$ with discrepancy $O(\sqrt{n\log(m/n+2)})$. We provide an algorithm to find such a…
We consider the discrepancy problem of coloring $n$ intervals with $k$ colors such that at each point on the line, the maximal difference between the number of intervals of any two colors is minimal. Somewhat surprisingly, a coloring with…
We study discrepancy minimization for vectors in $\mathbb{R}^n$ under various settings. The main result is the analysis of a new simple random process in multiple dimensions through a comparison argument. As corollaries, we obtain bounds…
The partial coloring method is one of the most powerful and widely used method in combinatorial discrepancy problems. However, in many cases it leads to sub-optimal bounds as the partial coloring step must be iterated a logarithmic number…
In this paper we study a family of discrete configuration spaces, the so-called protocol complexes, which are of utmost importance in theoretical distributed computing. Specifically, we consider questions of the existance of compliant…
Motivated by the Matrix Spencer conjecture, we study the problem of finding signed sums of matrices with a small matrix norm. A well-known strategy to obtain these signs is to prove, given matrices $A_1, \dots, A_n \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times…
Discrepancy theory provides powerful tools for producing higher-quality objects which "beat the union bound" in fundamental settings throughout combinatorics and computer science. However, this quality has often come at the price of more…
Consider a simple random walk on $\mathbb{Z}$ with a random coloring of $\mathbb{Z}$. Look at the sequence of the first $N$ steps taken in the random walk, together with the colors of the visited locations. We call this the record. From the…
A classical problem in combinatorics seeks colorings of low discrepancy. More concretely, the goal is to color the elements of a set system so that the number of appearances of any color among the elements in each set is as balanced as…
Consider a unit interval $[0,1]$ in which $n$ points arrive one-by-one independently and uniformly at random. On arrival of a point, the problem is to immediately and irrevocably color it in $\{+1,-1\}$ while ensuring that every interval…
We introduce a new algorithmic framework for discrepancy minimization based on regularization. We demonstrate how varying the regularizer allows us to re-interpret several breakthrough works in algorithmic discrepancy, ranging from…