Related papers: Pseudorandomness and Combinatorial Constructions
The probabilistic method is a technique for proving combinatorial existence results by means of showing that a randomly chosen object has the desired properties with positive probability. A particularly powerful probabilistic tool is the…
Proof by coupling is a classical technique for proving properties about pairs of randomized algorithms by carefully relating (or coupling) two probabilistic executions. In this paper, we show how to automatically construct such proofs for…
In this work, we introduce a framework to study the effect of random operations on the combinatorial list-decodability of a code. The operations we consider correspond to row and column operations on the matrix obtained from the code by…
Probabilistic argumentation allows reasoning about argumentation problems in a way that is well-founded by probability theory. However, in practice, this approach can be severely limited by the fact that probabilities are defined by adding…
Probabilistic separation logic offers an approach to reasoning about imperative probabilistic programs in which a separating conjunction is used as a mechanism for expressing independence properties. Crucial to the effectiveness of the…
Decision theories offer principled methods for making choices under various types of uncertainty. Algorithms that implement these theories have been successfully applied to a wide range of real-world problems, including materials and drug…
This is a draft of an article to appear in the October 2022 issue of the Notices of the AMS. In this survey article we explore a fascinating area called descriptive combinatorics and its recently discovered connections to distributed…
Submodular functions are discrete functions that model laws of diminishing returns and enjoy numerous algorithmic applications. They have been used in many areas, including combinatorial optimization, machine learning, and economics. In…
Composite likelihood has shown promise in settings where the number of parameters $p$ is large due to its ability to break down complex models into simpler components, thus enabling inference even when the full likelihood is not tractable.…
Diagonalization in the spirit of Cantor's diagonal arguments is a widely used tool in theoretical computer sciences to obtain structural results about computational problems and complexity classes by indirect proofs. The Uniform…
Testing algorithms across a wide range of problem instances is crucial to ensure the validity of any claim about one algorithm's superiority over another. However, when it comes to inference algorithms for probabilistic logic programs,…
In contrast with software-generated randomness (called pseudo-randomness), quantum randomness is provable incomputable, i.e.\ it is not exactly reproducible by any algorithm. We provide experimental evidence of incomputability --- an…
We show the first unconditional pseudo-determinism result for all of search-BPP. Specifically, we show that every BPP search problem can be computed pseudo-deterministically on average for infinitely many input lengths. In other words, for…
The process of doing Science in condition of uncertainty is illustrated with a toy experiment in which the inferential and the forecasting aspects are both present. The fundamental aspects of probabilistic reasoning, also relevant in real…
In theory, the probabilistic linkage method provides two distinct advantages over non-probabilistic methods, including minimal rates of linkage error and accurate measures of these rates for data users. However, implementations can fall…
This article deals with plausible reasoning from incomplete knowledge about large-scale spatial properties. The availableinformation, consisting of a set of pointwise observations,is extrapolated to neighbour points. We make use of belief…
Probabilistic Cell Decomposition (PCD) is a probabilistic path planning method combining the concepts of approximate cell decomposition with probabilistic sampling. It has been shown that the use of lazy evaluation techniques and supervised…
A major achievement of mechanism design theory is a general method for the construction of truthful mechanisms called VCG (Vickrey, Clarke, Groves). When applying this method to complex problems such as combinatorial auctions, a difficulty…
We explore the interplay between random and deterministic phenomena using a representation of uncertainty based on the measure-theoretic concept of outer measure. The meaning of the analogues of different probabilistic concepts is…
The requirement of a language to be conditionally decomposable is imposed on a specification language in the coordination supervisory control framework of discrete-event systems. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for the…