Preprints
Beyond Value Iteration for Parity Games: Strategy Iteration with Universal Trees
with Georg Loho
Parity games have witnessed several new quasi-polynomial algorithms since the breakthrough result of Calude et al. (2017). The central combinatorial object underlying these approaches is a universal tree, as identified by Czerwiński et al. (2019). By providing a quasi-polynomial lower bound on the size of universal trees, they have highlighted a barrier that must be overcome by all existing approaches to attain polynomial runtime. This is due to the existence of worst case instances which force these algorithms to explore a large portion of the tree.
As an attempt to overcome this barrier, we propose a strategy iteration framework which can be applied on any universal tree. It is at least as fast as its value iteration counterparts, while allowing one to take bigger leaps in the universal tree. Value iteration—asymptotically the fastest known algorithm for parity games—is a repeated application of operators associated with arcs in the game graph to obtain the least fixed point. Our main technical contribution is an efficient method for computing the least fixed point of operators associated with arcs in a strategy subgraph. This is achieved via a careful adaptation of shortest path algorithms to the setting of ordered trees. By plugging in the universal tree of Jurdziński and Lazić (2017), or the Strahler universal tree of Daviaud et al. (2020), we obtain instantiations of the general framework that take time O(mn2log n log d) and O(mn2log3n log d) respectively per iteration.
Publications
We present an accelerated, or 'look-ahead' version of the Newton–Dinkelbach method, a well-known technique for solving fractional and parametric optimization problems. This acceleration halves the Bregman divergence between the current iterate and the optimal solution within every two iterations. Using the Bregman divergence as a potential in conjunction with combinatorial arguments, we obtain strongly polynomial algorithms in three applications domains: (i) For linear fractional combinatorial optimization, we show a convergence bound of O(m log m) iterations; the previous best bound was O(m2log m) by Wang et al. (2006). (ii) We obtain a strongly polynomial label-correcting algorithm for solving linear feasibility systems with two variables per inequality (2VPI). For a 2VPI system with n variables and m constraints, our algorithm runs in O(mn) iterations. Every iteration takes O(mn) time for general 2VPI systems, and O(m + n log n) time for the special case of deterministic Markov Decision Processes (DMDPs). This extends and strengthens a previous result by Madani (2002) that showed a weakly polynomial bound for a variant of the Newton–Dinkelbach method for solving DMDPs. (iii) We give a simplified variant of the parametric submodular function minimization result by Goemans et al. (2017).
Cooperative games form an important class of problems in game theory, where the goal is to distribute a value among a set of players who are allowed to cooperate by forming coalitions. An outcome of the game is given by an allocation vector that assigns a value share to each player. A crucial aspect of such games is submodularity (or convexity). Indeed, convex instances of cooperative games exhibit several nice properties, e.g. regarding the existence and computation of allocations realizing some of the most important solution concepts proposed in the literature. For this reason, a relevant question is whether one can give a polynomial time characterization of submodular instances, for prominent cooperative games that are in general non-convex. In this paper, we focus on a fundamental and widely studied cooperative game, namely the spanning tree game. An efficient recognition of submodular instances of this game was not known so far, and explicitly mentioned as an open question in the literature. We here settle this open problem by giving a polynomial-time characterization of submodular spanning tree games.
An edge-weighted graph G is called stable if the value of a maximum-weight matching equals the value of a maximum-weight fractional matching. Stable graphs play an important role in network bargaining games and cooperative matching games, because they characterize instances which admit stable outcomes. We give the first polynomial-time algorithm to find a minimum cardinality subset of vertices whose removal from G yields a stable graph, for any weighted graph G. The algorithm is combinatorial and exploits new structural properties of basic fractional matchings. In particular, one of the main ingredients of our result is the development of a polynomial-time algorithm to compute a basic maximum-weight fractional matching with the minimum number of odd cycles in its support. This generalizes a fundamental and classical result on unweighted matchings given by Balas more than 30 years ago, which we expect to prove useful beyond this particular application. In contrast, we show that the problem of finding a minimum cardinality subset of edges whose removal from a weighted graph G yields a stable graph, does not admit any constant-factor approximation algorithm, unless P = NP. In this setting, we develop an O(Δ)-approximation algorithm for the problem, where Δ is the maximum degree of a node in G.
I am a PhD student working as part of the ERC project ScaleOpt. My advisor is László Végh. Previously, I was a research assistant in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, supervised by Laura Sanità.
I received my Bachelors and Masters degrees from the University of Waterloo.