arXiv subjects

Omer Reingold

Publications and source records attributed to Omer Reingold.

41 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2012

DNF Sparsification and a Faster Deterministic Counting Algorithm

Given a DNF formula on n variables, the two natural size measures are the number of terms or size s(f), and the maximum width of a term w(f). It is folklore that short DNF formulas can be made narrow. We prove a converse, showing that narrow formulas can be sparsified. More precisely, any width w DNF irrespective of its size can be $ε$-approximated by a width $w$ DNF with at most $(w\log(1/ε))^{O(w)}$ terms. We combine our sparsification result with the work of Luby and Velikovic to give a faster deterministic algorithm for approximately counting the number of satisfying solutions to a DNF. Given a formula on n variables with poly(n) terms, we give a deterministic $n^{\tilde{O}(\log \log(n))}$ time algorithm that computes an additive $ε$ approximation to the fraction of satisfying assignments of f for $ε= 1/\poly(\log n)$. The previous best result due to Luby and Velickovic from nearly two decades ago had a run-time of $n^{\exp(O(\sqrt{\log \log n}))}$.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2011

Fairness Through Awareness

We study fairness in classification, where individuals are classified, e.g., admitted to a university, and the goal is to prevent discrimination against individuals based on their membership in some group, while maintaining utility for the classifier (the university). The main conceptual contribution of this paper is a framework for fair classification comprising (1) a (hypothetical) task-specific metric for determining the degree to which individuals are similar with respect to the classification task at hand; (2) an algorithm for maximizing utility subject to the fairness constraint, that similar individuals are treated similarly. We also present an adaptation of our approach to achieve the complementary goal of "fair affirmative action," which guarantees statistical parity (i.e., the demographics of the set of individuals receiving any classification are the same as the demographics of the underlying population), while treating similar individuals as similarly as possible. Finally, we discuss the relationship of fairness to privacy: when fairness implies privacy, and how tools developed in the context of differential privacy may be applied to fairness.

cs.CC↗

arXiv2008

New Proofs of the Green-Tao-Ziegler Dense Model Theorem: An Exposition

Green, Tao and Ziegler prove ``Dense Model Theorems'' of the following form: if R is a (possibly very sparse) pseudorandom subset of set X, and D is a dense subset of R, then D may be modeled by a set M whose density inside X is approximately the same as the density of D in R. More generally, they show that a function that is majorized by a pseudorandom measure can be written as a sum of a bounded function having the same expectation plus a function that is ``indistinguishable from zero.'' This theorem plays a key role in the proof of the Green-Tao Theorem that the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. In this note, we present a new proof of the Green-Tao-Ziegler Dense Model Theorem, which was discovered independently by ourselves and Gowers. We refer to our full paper for variants of the result with connections and applications to computational complexity theory, and to Gowers' paper for applications of the proof technique to ``decomposition, ``structure,'' and ``transference'' theorems in arithmetic and extremal combinatorics (as well as a broader survey of such theorems).

math.CO↗

arXiv2008

The Player's Effect

In a function that takes its inputs from various players, the effect of a player measures the variation he can cause in the expectation of that function. In this paper we prove a tight upper bound on the number of players with large effect, a bound that holds even when the players' inputs are only known to be pairwise independent. We also study the effect of a set of players, and show that there always exists a "small" set that, when eliminated, leaves every set with little effect. Finally, we ask whether there always exists a player with positive effect. We answer this question differently in various scenarios, depending on the properties of the function and the distribution of players' inputs. More specifically, we show that if the function is non-monotone or the distribution is only known to be pairwise independent, then it is possible that all players have 0 effect. If the distribution is pairwise independent with minimal support, on the other hand, then there must exist a player with "large" effect.

math.PR↗

arXiv2004

Entropy waves, the zig-zag graph product, and new constant-degree

The main contribution of this work is a new type of graph product, which we call the {\it zig-zag product}. Taking a product of a large graph with a small graph, the resulting graph inherits (roughly) its size from the large one, its degree from the small one, and its expansion properties from both! Iteration yields simple explicit constructions of constant-degree expanders of arbitrary size, starting from one constant-size expander. Crucial to our intuition (and simple analysis) of the properties of this graph product is the view of expanders as functions which act as ``entropy wave" propagators -- they transform probability distributions in which entropy is concentrated in one area to distributions where that concentration is dissipated. In these terms, the graph products affords the constructive interference of two such waves. Subsequent work [ALW01], [MW01] relates the zig-zag product of graphs to the standard semidirect product of groups, leading to new results and constructions on expanding Cayley graphs.

math.CO↗