Truly Subcubic Min-Plus Product for Less Structured Matrices, with Applications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a truly subcubic algorithm for Min-Plus matrix multiplication with less structured inputs and applies it to improve algorithms for APSP, range mode, and maximum subarray problems, broadening their efficiency and applicability.

Contribution

The paper presents the first truly subcubic algorithm for Min-Plus product on less structured matrices and extends its applications to several classical problems, improving their computational bounds.

Findings

Subcubic Min-Plus product algorithm for matrices with structured blocks.

Truly subcubic APSP algorithm in a new class of geometric graphs.

Improved subcubic algorithm for maximum subarray with bounded entries.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to get truly subcubic algorithms for Min-Plus product for less structured inputs than what was previously known, and to apply them to versions of All-Pairs Shortest Paths (APSP) and other problems. The results are as follows: (1) Our main result is the first truly subcubic algorithm for the Min-Plus product of two $n\times n$ matrices $A$ and $B$ with $\text{polylog}(n)$ bit integer entries, where $B$ has a partitioning into $n^{\epsilon}\times n^{\epsilon}$ blocks (for any $\epsilon>0$) where each block is at most $n^\delta$-far (for $\delta<3-\omega$, where $2\leq \omega<2.373$) in $\ell_\infty$ norm from a constant rank integer matrix. This result presents the most general case to date of Min-Plus product that is solvable in truly subcubic time. (2) The first application of our main result is a truly subcubic algorithm for APSP in a new type of geometric graph. Our result extends the result of Chan'10 in the case of integer edge weights by allowing the weights to differ from a function of the end-point identities by at most $n^\delta$ for small $\delta$. (3) In the second application we consider a batch version of the range mode problem in which one is given a length $n$ sequence and $n$ contiguous subsequences, and one is asked to compute the range mode of each subsequence. We give the first $O(n^{1.5-\epsilon})$ time for $\epsilon>0$ algorithm for this batch range mode problem. (4) Our final application is to the Maximum Subarray problem: given an $n\times n$ integer matrix, find the contiguous subarray of maximum entry sum. We show that Maximum Subarray can be solved in truly subcubic, $O(n^{3-\epsilon})$ (for $\epsilon>0$) time, as long as the entries are no larger than $O(n^{0.62})$ in absolute value. We also improve all the known conditional hardness results for the $d$-dimensional variant of Maximum Subarray.