Computing shortest paths is one of the central problems in the theory of distributed computing. For the last few years, substantial progress has been made on the approximate single source shortest paths problem, culminating in an algorithm of Henzinger, Krinninger, and Nanongkai [STOC’16] which deterministically computes (1+o(1))-approximate shortest paths in O(D+√n) time, where D is the hop-diameter of the graph. Up to logarithmic factors, this time complexity is optimal, matching the lower bound of Elkin [STOC’04]. The question of exact shortest paths however saw no algorithmic progress for decades, until the recent breakthrough of Elkin [STOC’17], which established a sublinear-time algorithm for exact single source shortest paths on undirected graphs. Shortly after, [FOCS’17] provided improved algorithms for exact all pairs shortest paths problem on directed graphs. In this paper, we provide an alternative single-source shortest path algorithm with complexity O(n3 4D1 4). For polylogarithmic D, this improves on Elkin’s O(n5 6) bound and gets closer to the Ω(n1 2) lower bound of Elkin [STOC’04]. For larger values of D, we present an improved variant of our algorithm which achieves complexity O(max n3 4+o(1) , n3 4D1 6 + D ), and thus compares favorably with Elkin’s bound of O(max n5 6, n2 3D1 3 + D ) in essentially the entire range of parameters. This algorithm provides also a qualitative improvement, because it works for the more challenging case of directed graph (i.e., graphs where the two directions of an edge can have different weights), constituting the first sublinear-time algorithm for directed graphs. Our algorithm also extends to the case of exact r-source shortest paths, in which we provide the fastest algorithm for moderately small r and D, improving on those of
In this paper, we present algorithms that improve on this state of the art both quantitatively and qualitatively for integer-weighted graphs. We will soon discuss the quantitative aspect, i.e., the improvements in the bounds. The qualitative aspect is the fact that our algorithms extend to networks with asymmetric weights, i.e., when the two directions of an edge can have different weights. Although this asymmetric case is relevant for practical networks, it has gained a far more important motivation recently even when working on graphs with symmetric weights, due to the introduction of the @cite_17 to distributed computing. The scaling framework massages the weights in a way that simplifies the problem considerably, modulo the potential of making the weights asymmetric. We will discuss this framework in the next section.
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We present a method for solving the shortest transshipmen problem - also known as uncapacitated minimum cost flow - up to a multiplicative error of @math in undirected graphs with polynomially bounded integer edge weights using a tailored gradient descent algorithm. An important special case of the transshipment problem is the single-source shortest paths (SSSP) problem. Our gradient descent algorithm takes @math iterations, and in each iteration it needs to solve the transshipment problem up to a multiplicative error of @math , where @math is the number of nodes. In particular, this allows us to perform a single iteration by computing a solution on a sparse spanner of logarithmic stretch. As a consequence, we improve prior work by obtaining the following results: (1) Broadcast congest model: @math -approximate SSSP using @math rounds, where @math is the (hop) diameter of the network. (2) Broadcast congested clique model: @math -approximate transshipment and SSSP using @math rounds. (3) Multipass streaming model: @math -approximate transshipment and SSSP using @math space and @math passes. The previously fastest algorithms for these models leverage sparse hop sets. We bypass the hop set construction; computing a spanner is sufficient with our method. The above bounds assume non-negative integer edge weights that are polynomially bounded in @math ; for general non-negative weights, running times scale with the logarithm of the maximum ratio between non-zero weights. In case of asymmetric costs, running times scale with the maximum ratio between the costs of both directions over all edges. We propose a scheme to introduce directionality in the random walker algorithm for image segmentation. In particular, we extend the optimization framework of this algorithm to combinatorial graphs with directed edges. Our scheme is interactive and requires the user to label a few pixels that are representative of a foreground object and of the background. These labeled pixels are used to learn intensity models for the object and the background, which allow us to automatically set the weights of the directed edges. These weights are chosen so that they bias the direction of the object boundary gradients to flow from regions that agree well with the learned object intensity model to regions that do not agree well. We use these weights to define an energy function that associates asymmetric quadratic penalties with the edges in the graph. We show that this energy function is convex, hence it has a unique minimizer. We propose a provably convergent iterative algorithm for minimizing this energy function. We also describe the construction of an equivalent electrical network with diodes and resistors that solves the same segmentation problem as our framework. Finally, our experiments on a database of 69 images show that the use of directional information does improve the segmenting power of the random Walker algorithm. We study computing all-pairs shortest paths (APSP) on distributed networks (the CONGEST model). The goal is for every node in the (weighted) network to know the distance from every other node using communication. The problem admits (1+o(1))-approximation &#xd5;(n)-time algorithms [2], [3], which are matched with &#x3a9;(n)-time lower bounds [4], [5], , &#xd5; and &#x3a9; hide polylogarithmic factors. Note that the lower bounds also hold even in the unweighted case and in the weighted case with polynomial approximation ratios. . No &#x3a9;(n) lower bound or o(m) upper bound were known for exact computation.In this paper, we present an &#xd5;(n^ 5 4 )-time randomized (Las Vegas) algorithm for exact weighted APSP; this provides the first improvement over the naive O(m)-time algorithm when the network is not so sparse. Our result also holds for the case where edge weights are asymmetric (a.k.a. the directed case where communication is bidirectional). Our techniques also yield an &#xd5;(n^ 3 4 k^ 1 2 +n)-time algorithm for the k-source shortest paths problem where we want every node to know distances from k sources; this improves Elkins recent bound [6] when k= &#x3a9;(n^ 1 4 ).We achieve the above results by developing distributed algorithms on top of the classic scaling technique, which we believe is used for the first time for distributed shortest paths computation. One new algorithm which might be of an independent interest is for the reversed r-sink shortest paths problem, where we want every of r sinks to know its distances from all other nodes, given that every node already knows its distance to every sink. We show an &#xd5;(n&#x221a; r )-time algorithm for this problem. Another new algorithm is called short range extension, where we show that in &#xd5;(n&#x221a; h ) time the knowledge about distances can be extended for additional h hops. For this, we use weight rounding to introduce small additive errors which can be later fixed. We introduce and study the concept of an asymmetric swap-equilibrium for network creation games. A graph where every edge is owned by one of its endpoints is called to be in asymmetric swap-equilibrium, if no vertex v can delete its own edge v,w and add a new edge v,w′ and thereby decrease the sum of distances from v to all other vertices. This equilibrium concept generalizes and unifies some of the previous equilibrium concepts for network creation games. While the structure and the quality of equilibrium networks is still not fully understood, we provide further (partial) insights for this open problem. As the two main results, we show that (1) every asymmetric swap-equilibrium has at most one (non-trivial) 2-edge-connected component, and (2) we show a logarithmic upper bound on the diameter of an asymmetric swap-equilibrium for the case that the minimum degree of the unique 2-edge-connected component is at least ne, for @math . Due to the generalizing property of asymmetric swap equilibria, these results hold for several equilibrium concepts that were previously studied. Along the way, we introduce a node-weighted version of the network creation games, which is of independent interest for further studies of network creation games.