arXiv subjects

Sharmila Duppala

Publications and source records attributed to Sharmila Duppala.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Proportionally Fair Matching via Randomized Rounding

Given an edge-colored graph, the goal of the proportional fair matching problem is to find a maximum weight matching while ensuring proportional representation (with respect to the number of edges) of each color. The colors may correspond to demographic groups or other protected traits where we seek to ensure roughly equal representation from each group. It is known that, assuming ETH, it is impossible to approximate the problem with $\ell$ colors in time $2^{o(\ell)} n^{\mathcal{O}(1)}$ (i.e., subexponential in $\ell$) even on \emph{unweighted path graphs}. Further, even determining the existence of a non-empty matching satisfying proportionality is NP-Hard. To overcome this hardness, we relax the stringent proportional fairness constraints to a probabilistic notion. We introduce a notion we call $δ$-\textsc{ProbablyAlmostFair}, where we ensure proportionality up to a factor of at most $(1 \pm δ)$ for some small $δ>0$ with high probability. The violation $δ$ can be brought arbitrarily close to $0$ for some \emph{good} instances with large values of matching size. We propose and analyze simple and fast algorithms for bipartite graphs that achieve constant-factor approximation guarantees, and return a $δ$-\textsc{ProbablyAlmostFair} matching.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2024

Robust Fair Clustering with Group Membership Uncertainty Sets

We study the canonical fair clustering problem where each cluster is constrained to have close to population-level representation of each group. Despite significant attention, the salient issue of having incomplete knowledge about the group membership of each point has been superficially addressed. In this paper, we consider a setting where the assigned group memberships are noisy. We introduce a simple noise model that requires a small number of parameters to be given by the decision maker. We then present an algorithm for fair clustering with provable \emph{robustness} guarantees. Our framework enables the decision maker to trade off between the robustness and the clustering quality. Unlike previous work, our algorithms are backed by worst-case theoretical guarantees. Finally, we empirically verify the performance of our algorithm on real world datasets and show its superior performance over existing baselines.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Concentration of Submodular Functions and Read-k Families Under Negative Dependence

We study the question of whether submodular functions of random variables satisfying various notions of negative dependence satisfy Chernoff-like concentration inequalities. We prove such a concentration inequality for the lower tail when the random variables satisfy negative association or negative regression, partially resolving an open problem raised in (Qiu and Singla [QS22]). Previous work showed such concentration results for random variables that come from specific dependent-rounding algorithms (Chekuri, Vondrak, and Zenklusen [CVZ10] and Harvey and Olver [HO14]). We discuss some applications of our results to combinatorial optimization and beyond. We also show applications to the concentration of read-k families [Gav+15] under certain forms of negative dependence; we further show a simplified proof of the entropy-method approach of [Gav+15].

cs.DS↗

arXiv2024

Barter Exchange with Shared Item Valuations

In barter exchanges agents enter seeking to swap their items for other items on their wishlist. We consider a centralized barter exchange with a set of agents and items where each item has a positive value. The goal is to compute a (re)allocation of items maximizing the agents' collective utility subject to each agent's total received value being comparable to their total given value. Many such centralized barter exchanges exist and serve crucial roles; e.g., kidney exchange programs, which are often formulated as variants of directed cycle packing. We show finding a reallocation where each agent's total given and total received values are equal is NP-hard. On the other hand, we develop a randomized algorithm that achieves optimal utility in expectation and where, i) for any agent, with probability 1 their received value is at least their given value minus $v^*$ where $v^*$ is said agent's most valuable owned and wished-for item, and ii) each agent's given and received values are equal in expectation.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2023

Rawlsian Fairness in Online Bipartite Matching: Two-sided, Group, and Individual

Online bipartite-matching platforms are ubiquitous and find applications in important areas such as crowdsourcing and ridesharing. In the most general form, the platform consists of three entities: two sides to be matched and a platform operator that decides the matching. The design of algorithms for such platforms has traditionally focused on the operator's (expected) profit. Since fairness has become an important consideration that was ignored in the existing algorithms a collection of online matching algorithms have been developed that give a fair treatment guarantee for one side of the market at the expense of a drop in the operator's profit. In this paper, we generalize the existing work to offer fair treatment guarantees to both sides of the market simultaneously, at a calculated worst case drop to operator profit. We consider group and individual Rawlsian fairness criteria. Moreover, our algorithms have theoretical guarantees and have adjustable parameters that can be tuned as desired to balance the trade-off between the utilities of the three sides. We also derive hardness results that give clear upper bounds over the performance of any algorithm.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2023

Fair Labeled Clustering

Numerous algorithms have been produced for the fundamental problem of clustering under many different notions of fairness. Perhaps the most common family of notions currently studied is group fairness, in which proportional group representation is ensured in every cluster. We extend this direction by considering the downstream application of clustering and how group fairness should be ensured for such a setting. Specifically, we consider a common setting in which a decision-maker runs a clustering algorithm, inspects the center of each cluster, and decides an appropriate outcome (label) for its corresponding cluster. In hiring for example, there could be two outcomes, positive (hire) or negative (reject), and each cluster would be assigned one of these two outcomes. To ensure group fairness in such a setting, we would desire proportional group representation in every label but not necessarily in every cluster as is done in group fair clustering. We provide algorithms for such problems and show that in contrast to their NP-hard counterparts in group fair clustering, they permit efficient solutions. We also consider a well-motivated alternative setting where the decision-maker is free to assign labels to the clusters regardless of the centers' positions in the metric space. We show that this setting exhibits interesting transitions from computationally hard to easy according to additional constraints on the problem. Moreover, when the constraint parameters take on natural values we show a randomized algorithm for this setting that always achieves an optimal clustering and satisfies the fairness constraints in expectation. Finally, we run experiments on real world datasets that validate the effectiveness of our algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Online minimum matching with uniform metric and random arrivals

We consider Online Minimum Bipartite Matching under the uniform metric. We show that Randomized Greedy achieves a competitive ratio equal to $(1+1/n) (H_{n+1}-1)$, which matches the lower bound. Comparing with the fact that RG achieves an optimal ratio of $Θ(\ln n)$ for the same problem but under the adversarial order, we find that the weaker arrival assumption of random order doesn't offer any extra algorithmic advantage for RG, or make the model strictly more tractable.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2019

Data Races and the Discrete Resource-time Tradeoff Problem with Resource Reuse over Paths

A determinacy race occurs if two or more logically parallel instructions access the same memory location and at least one of them tries to modify its content. Races often lead to nondeterministic and incorrect program behavior. A data race is a special case of a determinacy race which can be eliminated by associating a mutual-exclusion lock or allowing atomic accesses to the memory location. However, such solutions can reduce parallelism by serializing all accesses to that location. For associative and commutative updates, reducers allow parallel race-free updates at the expense of using some extra space. We ask the following question. Given a fixed budget of extra space to mitigate the cost of races in a parallel program, which memory locations should be assigned reducers and how should the space be distributed among the reducers in order to minimize the overall running time? We argue that the races can be captured by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), with nodes representing memory cells and arcs representing read-write dependencies between cells. We then formulate our optimization problem on DAGs. We concentrate on a variation of this problem where space reuse among reducers is allowed by routing extra space along a source to sink path of the DAG and using it in the construction of reducers along the path. We consider two reducers and the corresponding duration functions (i.e., reduction time as a function of space budget). We generalize our race-avoiding space-time tradeoff problem to a discrete resource-time tradeoff problem with general non-increasing duration functions and resource reuse over paths. For general DAGs, the offline problem is strongly NP-hard under all three duration functions, and we give approximation algorithms. We also prove hardness of approximation for the general resource-time tradeoff problem and give a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for series-parallel DAGs.

cs.DC↗