Related papers: Tolerant Junta Testing and the Connection to Submo…
The Local Lemma is a fundamental tool of probabilistic combinatorics and theoretical computer science, yet there are hardly any natural problems known where it provides an asymptotically tight answer. The main theme of our paper is to…
We show that a Boolean degree $d$ function on the slice $\binom{[n]}{k}$ is a junta if $k \geq 2d$, and that this bound is sharp. We prove a similar result for $A$-valued degree $d$ functions for arbitrary finite $A$, and for functions on…
The approximate degree of a Boolean function f is the least degree of a real polynomial that approximates f pointwise to error at most 1/3. Approximate degree is known to be a lower bound on quantum query complexity. We resolve or nearly…
Following recent advances in combining approximation algorithms with fixed-parameter tractability (FPT), we study FPT-time approximation algorithms for minimum-norm $k$-clustering problems, parameterized by the number $k$ of open…
A key fact in the theory of Boolean functions $f : \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is that they often undergo sharp thresholds. For example: if the function $f : \{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is monotone and symmetric under a transitive action with…
Maximizing a non-negative, monontone, submodular function $f$ over $n$ elements under a cardinality constraint $k$ (SMCC) is a well-studied NP-hard problem. It has important applications in, e.g., machine learning and influence…
It is generally believed that submodular functions -- and the more general class of $\gamma$-weakly submodular functions -- may only be optimized under the non-negativity assumption $f(S) \geq 0$. In this paper, we show that once the…
Submodular function optimization has numerous applications in machine learning and data analysis, including data summarization which aims to identify a concise and diverse set of data points from a large dataset. It is important to…
There are a number of approximation algorithms for NP-hard versions of low rank approximation, such as finding a rank-$k$ matrix $B$ minimizing the sum of absolute values of differences to a given $n$-by-$n$ matrix $A$,…
We present an adaptive tester for the unateness property of Boolean functions. Given a function $f:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ the tester makes $O(n \log(n)/\epsilon)$ adaptive queries to the function. The tester always accepts a unate function,…
An algorithm is given for determining an optimal $b$-step approximation of weighted data, where the error is measured with respect to the $L_\infty$ norm. For data presorted by the independent variable the algorithm takes $\Theta(n + \log n…
We prove a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/3})$ for the query complexity of any two-sided and adaptive algorithm that tests whether an unknown Boolean function $f:\{0,1\}^n\rightarrow \{0,1\}$ is monotone or far from monotone. This…
We study the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function with viability constraints. This problem originates from computational biology, where we are given a phylogenetic tree over a set of species and a directed graph, the…
Recently, there has been significant work studying distribution testing under the Conditional Sampling model. In this model, a query specifies a subset $S$ of the domain, and the output received is a sample drawn from the distribution…
In this work, we initiate the study of fault tolerant Max Cut, where given an edge-weighted undirected graph $G=(V,E)$, the goal is to find a cut $S\subseteq V$ that maximizes the total weight of edges that cross $S$ even after an adversary…
Submodular functions describe a variety of discrete problems in machine learning, signal processing, and computer vision. However, minimizing submodular functions poses a number of algorithmic challenges. Recent work introduced an…
In this paper, we study the tradeoff between the approximation guarantee and adaptivity for the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function subject to a cardinality constraint. The adaptivity of an algorithm is the number of…
A function $f$ is $d$-resilient if all its Fourier coefficients of degree at most $d$ are zero, i.e., $f$ is uncorrelated with all low-degree parities. We study the notion of $\mathit{approximate}$ $\mathit{resilience}$ of Boolean…
We provide an example of a monotone Boolean function on the hypercube given by a low depth decision tree that is not well approximated by any k-junta for small k.
A function defined on the Boolean hypercube is $k$-Fourier-sparse if it has at most $k$ nonzero Fourier coefficients. For a function $f: \mathbb{F}_2^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ and parameters $k$ and $d$, we prove a strong upper bound on the…