14459995
Phase Transitions of Dominating Clique Problem and Their Implications to Heuristics in Satisfiability Search
We study a monotone NP decision problem, the dominating clique problem, whose phase transition occurs at a very dense stage of the random graph evolution process. We establish the exact threshold of the phase transition and propose an efficient search algorithm that runs in super-polynomial time with high probability. Our empirical studies reveal two even more intriguing phenomena in its typical-case complexity: (1) the problem is "uniformly hard" with a tiny runtime variance on negative instances. (2) Our algorithm and its CNF-tailored implementation, outperform several SAT solvers by a huge margin on dominating cliques and some other SAT problems with similar structures.
11821573
Phase Transition of Tractability in Constraint Satisfaction and Bayesian Network Inference
There has been great interest in identifying tractable subclasses of NP complete problems and designing efficient algorithms for these tractable classes. Constraint satisfaction and Bayesian network inference are two examples of such problems that are of great importance in AI and algorithms. In this paper we study, under the frameworks of random constraint satisfaction problems and random Bayesian networks, a typical tractable subclass characterized by the treewidth of the problems. We show that the property of having a bounded treewidth for CSPs and Bayesian network inference problem has a phase transition that occurs while the underlying structures of problems are still sparse. This implies that algorithms making use of treewidth based structural knowledge only work efficiently in a limited range of random instance.
45061344
Space Complexity of Estimation of Distribution Algorithms
In this paper, we investigate the space complexity of the Estimation of Distribution Algorithms (EDAs), a class of sampling-based variants of the genetic algorithm. By analyzing the nature of EDAs, we identify criteria that characterize the space complexity of two typical implementation schemes of EDAs, the factorized distribution algorithm and Bayesian network-based algorithms. Using random additive functions as the prototype, we prove that the space complexity of the factorized distribution algorithm and Bayesian network-based algorithms is exponential in the problem size even if the optimization problem has a very sparse interaction structure.
3221081
Consistency and Random Constraint Satisfaction Models
In this paper, we study the possibility of designing non-trivial random CSP models by exploiting the intrinsic connection between structures and typical-case hardness. We show that constraint consistency, a notion that has been developed to improve the efficiency of CSP algorithms, is in fact the key to the design of random CSP models that have interesting phase transition behavior and guaranteed exponential resolution complexity without putting much restriction on the parameter of constraint tightness or the domain size of the problem. We propose a very flexible framework for constructing problem instances with interesting behavior and develop a variety of concrete methods to construct specific random CSP models that enforce different levels of constraint consistency. 
 
A series of experimental studies with interesting observations are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of introducing structural elements in random instances, to verify the robustness of our proposal, and to investigate features of some specific models based on our framework that are highly related to the behavior of backtracking search algorithms.
2287582
Resolution complexity of random constraint satisfaction problems: Another half of the story
Let C"n","m^2^,^k^,^t be a random constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) on n binary variables, where m constraints are selected uniformly at random from all the possible k-ary constraints each of which contains exactly t tuples of the values as its restrictions. We establish an upper bound on the constraint tightness threshold for C"n","m^2^,^k^,^t to have an exponential resolution complexity. The upper bound partly answers the open problem regarding the CSP resolution complexity with the tightness between the existing upper and lower bounds [D. Mitchell, Resolution complexity of random constraints, in: Proceedings Principles and Practices of Constraint Programming-CP 2002, Springer, Berlin, 2002, pp. 295-309].
181464
An Analysis of Phase Transition in NK Landscapes
In this paper, we analyze the decision version of the NK landscape model from the perspective of threshold phenomena and phase transitions under two random distributions, the uniform probability model and the fixed ratio model. For the uniform probability model, we prove that the phase transition is easy in the sense that there is a polynomial algorithm that can solve a random instance of the problem with the probability asymptotic to 1 as the problem size tends to infinity. For the fixed ratio model, we establish several upper bounds for the solubility threshold, and prove that random instances with parameters above these upper bounds can be solved polynomially. This, together with our empirical study for random instances generated below and in the phase transition region, suggests that the phase transition of the fixed ratio model is also easy.
5391334
Sequence homology detection through large scale pattern discovery
Extended Abstract We describe a new approach for idenhifling sequence similatity between a query sequence and a data base of proteins. The central idea is the use of a set ofpattems obtainedfiom the underlying data base through an one-time computation. These patterns are subsequently searchedfor on every query sequence presented to the system. A pattern matched by a region of the quev pinpoints to a potential local similarity between that reg+on and all the data base sequences also matching that pattern. By using a set of prudently chosen patterns, the tool presented in this work is able to discover weak but biologically important similarities.
2438036
A case for exploiting self-similarity of network traffic in TCP congestion control
Analytical and empirical studies have shown that self-similar traffic can have a detrimental impact on network performance including amplified queuing delay and packet loss ratio. On the flip side, the ubiquity of scale-invariant burstiness observed across diverse networking contexts can be exploited to design better resource control algorithms. We explore the issue of exploiting the self-similar characteristics of network traffic in TCP congestion control. We show that the correlation structure present in long-range dependent traffic can be detected on-line and used to predict future traffic. We then devise an novel scheme, called TCP with traffic prediction (TCP-TP), that exploits the prediction result to infer, in the context of AIMD (additive increase, multiplicative decrease) steady-state dynamics, the optimal operational point for a TCP connection. Through analytical reasoning, we show that the impact of prediction errors on fairness is minimal. We also conduct ns-2 simulation and FreeBSD 4.1-based implementation studies to validate the design and to demonstrate the performance improvement in terms of packet loss ratio and throughput attained by connections.
15321155
Line-Based Affine Invariant Object Location Using Transformation Space Decomposition
This paper presents a novel line-based affine invariant object location methodology. Our algorithm employs a new line-based transformation space decomposition technique to exploit intrinsic structural information provided by line features. Furthermore, we propose a new line-based distance transform to integrate with our algorithm to provide efficient transformation cell evaluation and subdivision in a coarse to fine manner. The algorithm is able to rapidly accelerate the searching process while maintaining high discriminative power and minimal storage requirement. The efficiency and discriminative power of this methodology are demonstrated using real-world examples with promising results
24987149
LMRL: a multi-agent reinforcement learning model and algorithm
Multi-agent reinforcement learning technologies are mainly investigated from two perspectives: one is from the concurrence, and the other from the game theory. The former chiefly applies to cooperative multi-agent systems, while the latter usually applies to coordinated multi-agent systems. However, There exist some problems such as that of the credit assignment and the multiple Nash equilibriums for agents with them. In this paper, we propose a new multi-agent reinforcement learning model and algorithm LMRL from a layer perspective. LMRL model is composed of an offline training layer that employs a single agent reinforcement learning technology to acquire stationary strategy knowledge and an online interaction layer that employs a multi-agent reinforcement learning technology and the strategy knowledge that can be revised dynamically to interact with environment. An agent with LMRL can improve its generalization, adaptability and coordination ability. Experiments show that the performance of LMRL can be better than that of single agent reinforcement learning and Nash-Q.
10779366
An efficient adaptive focused crawler based on ontology learning
The enormous growth of the World Wide Web has made it important to perform resource discovery efficiently. Consequently, several new ideas have been proposed; among them a key technique is focused crawling which is able to crawl particular topical portions of the World Wide Web quickly without having to explore all Web pages. In this paper, we present an intelligent focused crawler algorithm in which we embed ontology to evaluate the page's relevance to the topic. Compared with other algorithms using domain knowledge, our algorithm can evolve the ontology automatically during crawl process. Considering the instinct characteristics of the ontology, propagation has also been imported to accelerate the evolution of the ontology. We applied our approaches in several tasks and provided an empirical evaluation which has shown promising results.