Related papers: An exponential lower bound for Cunningham's rule
The behavior of the simplex algorithm is a widely studied subject. Specifically, the question of the existence of a polynomial pivot rule for the simplex algorithm is of major importance. Here, we give exponential lower bounds for three…
The question whether the Simplex Algorithm admits an efficient pivot rule remains one of the most important open questions in discrete optimization. While many natural, deterministic pivot rules are known to yield exponential running times,…
The existence of a polynomial pivot rule for the simplex method for linear programming, policy iteration for Markov decision processes, and strategy improvement for parity games each are prominent open problems in their respective fields.…
We study policy iteration for infinite-horizon Markov decision processes. It has recently been shown policy iteration style algorithms have exponential lower bounds in a two player game setting. We extend these lower bounds to Markov…
The existence of a pivot rule for the simplex method that guarantees a strongly polynomial run-time is a longstanding, fundamental open problem in the theory of linear programming. The leading pivot rule in theory is the shadow pivot rule,…
This paper presents a new exponential lower bound for the two most popular deterministic variants of the strategy improvement algorithms for solving parity, mean payoff, discounted payoff and simple stochastic games. The first variant…
Unique Sink Orientations (USOs) are an appealing abstraction of several major optimization problems of applied mathematics such as for instance Linear Programming (LP), Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) or 2-player Turn Based Stochastic…
Classical objectives in two-player zero-sum games played on graphs often deal with limit behaviors of infinite plays: e.g., mean-payoff and total-payoff in the quantitative setting, or parity in the qualitative one (a canonical way to…
Classical objectives in two-player zero-sum games played on graphs often deal with limit behaviors of infinite plays: e.g., mean-payoff and total-payoff in the quantitative setting, or parity in the qualitative one (a canonical way to…
An acyclic USO on a hypercube is formed by directing its edges in such as way that the digraph is acyclic and each face of the hypercube has a unique sink and a unique source. A path to the global sink of an acyclic USO can be modeled as…
Parity games are abstract infinite-round games that take an important role in formal verification. In the basic setting, these games are two-player, turn-based, and played under perfect information on directed graphs, whose nodes are…
This paper presents a new lower bound for the discrete strategy improvement algorithm for solving parity games due to Voege and Jurdziski. First, we informally show which structures are difficult to solve for the algorithm. Second, we…
Recent successes of game-theoretic formulations in ML have caused a resurgence of research interest in differentiable games. Overwhelmingly, that research focuses on methods and upper bounds on their speed of convergence. In this work, we…
We construct a family of Markov decision processes for which the policy iteration algorithm needs an exponential number of improving switches with Dantzig's rule, with Bland's rule, and with the Largest Increase pivot rule. This immediately…
We show subexponential lower bounds (i.e., $2^{\Omega (n^c)}$) on the smoothed complexity of the classical Howard's Policy Iteration algorithm for Markov Decision Processes. The bounds hold for the total reward and the average reward…
We study the lower tail behavior of the least singular value of an $n\times n$ random matrix $M_n := M+N_n$, where $M$ is a fixed complex matrix with operator norm at most $\exp(n^{c})$ and $N_n$ is a random matrix, each of whose entries is…
In this paper we study two-player bilinear zero-sum games with constrained strategy spaces. An instance of natural occurrences of such constraints is when mixed strategies are used, which correspond to a probability simplex constraint. We…
We develop value iteration-based algorithms to solve in a unified manner different classes of combinatorial zero-sum games with mean-payoff type rewards. These algorithms rely on an oracle, evaluating the dynamic programming operator up to…
The quantum approximate optimization algorithm, also known in its generalization as the quantum alternating operator ansatz, (QAOA) is a heuristic hybrid quantum-classical algorithm for finding high-quality approximate solutions to…
Parity games have witnessed several new quasi-polynomial algorithms since the breakthrough result of Calude et al. (STOC 2017). The combinatorial object underlying these approaches is a universal tree, as identified by Czerwi\'nski et al.…