Notion Of Acyclicity Research Articles

On the non-efficient PAC learnability of conjunctive queries

This note serves three purposes: (i) we provide a self-contained exposition of the fact that conjunctive queries are not efficiently learnable in the Probably-Approximately-Correct (PAC) model, paying clear attention to the complicating fact that this concept class lacks the polynomial-size fitting property, a property that is tacitly assumed in much of the computational learning theory literature; (ii) we establish a strong negative PAC learnability result that applies to many restricted classes of conjunctive queries (CQs), including acyclic CQs for a wide range of notions of acyclicity; (iii) we show that CQs (and UCQs) are efficiently PAC learnable with membership queries.

Inconsistency-tolerant query answering for existential rules

Querying inconsistent knowledge bases is an intriguing problem that gave rise to a flourishing research activity in the knowledge representation and reasoning community during the last years. It has been extensively studied in the context of description logics (DLs), and its computational complexity is rather well-understood. Although DLs are popular formalisms for modeling ontologies, it is generally agreed that rule-based ontologies are well-suited for data-intensive applications, since they allow us to conveniently deal with higher-arity relations, which naturally occur in standard relational databases. The goal of this work is to perform an in-depth complexity analysis of querying inconsistent knowledge bases in the case of the main decidable classes of existential rules, based on the notions of guardedness, linearity, acyclicity, and stickiness, enriched with negative (a.k.a. denial) constraints. Our investigation concentrates on three central inconsistency-tolerant semantics: the ABox repair (AR) semantics, considered as the standard one, and its main sound approximations, the intersection of repairs (IAR) semantics and the intersection of closed repairs (ICR) semantics.

Resolving Stanley's conjecture on $k$-fold acyclic complexes

In 1993 Stanley showed that if a simplicial complex is acyclic over some field, then its face poset can be decomposed into disjoint rank \(1\) boolean intervals whose minimal faces together form a subcomplex. Stanley further conjectured that complexes with a higher notion of acyclicity could be decomposed in a similar way using boolean intervals of higher rank. We provide an explicit counterexample to this conjecture. We also prove a version of the conjecture for boolean trees and show that the original conjecture holds when this notion of acyclicity is as high as possible.Mathematics Subject Classifications: 05E45, 55U10

Agrarian and $L^2$-invariants

We develop the theory of agrarian invariants, which are algebraic counterparts to $L^2$-invariants. Specifically, we introduce the notions of agrarian Betti numbers, agrarian acyclicity, agrarian torsion and agrarian polytope for finite free $G$-CW complexes together with a fixed choice of a ring homomorphism from the group ring $\mathbb{Z} G$ to a skew field. For the particular choice of the Linnell skew field $\mathcal{D}(G)$, this approach recovers most of the information encoded in the corresponding $L^2$-invariants. As an application, we prove that for agrarian groups of deficiency $1$, the agrarian polytope admits a marking of its vertices which controls the Bieri-Neumann-Strebel invariant of the group, improving a result of the second author and partially answering a question of Friedl-Tillmann. We also use the technology developed here to prove the Friedl-Tillmann conjecture on polytopes for two-generator one-relator groups; the proof forms the contents of another article.

Acyclic Gambling Games

We consider two-player, zero-sum stochastic games in which each player controls the player’s own state variable living in a compact metric space. The terminology comes from gambling problems in which the state of a player represents its wealth in a casino. Under standard assumptions (e.g., continuous running payoff and nonexpansive transitions), we consider for each discount factor the value vλ of the λ-discounted stochastic game and investigate its limit when λ goes to zero. We show that, under a new acyclicity condition, the limit exists and is characterized as the unique solution of a system of functional equations: the limit is the unique continuous excessive and depressive function such that each player, if the player’s opponent does not move, can reach the zone when the current payoff is at least as good as the limit value without degrading the limit value. The approach generalizes and provides a new viewpoint on the Mertens–Zamir system coming from the study of zero-sum repeated games with lack of information on both sides. A counterexample shows that under a slightly weaker notion of acyclicity, convergence of (vλ) may fail.

Conjunctive queries with inequalities under updates

Modern application domains such as Composite Event Recognition (CER) and real-time Analytics require the ability to dynamically refresh query results under high update rates. Traditional approaches to this problem are based either on the materialization of subresults (to avoid their recomputation) or on the recomputation of subresults (to avoid the space overhead of materialization). Both techniques have recently been shown suboptimal: instead of materializing results and subresults, one can maintain a data structure that supports efficient maintenance under updates and can quickly enumerate the full query output, as well as the changes produced under single updates. Unfortunately, these data structures have been developed only for aggregate-join queries composed of equi-joins, limiting their applicability in domains such as CER where temporal joins are commonplace. In this paper, we present a new approach for dynamically evaluating queries with multi-way θ -joins under updates that is effective in avoiding both materialization and recomputation of results, while supporting a wide range of applications. To do this we generalize Dynamic Yannakakis, an algorithm for dynamically processing acyclic equi-join queries. In tandem, and of independent interest, we generalize the notions of acyclicity and free-connexity to arbitrary θ -joins. We instantiate our framework to the case where θ -joins are only composed of equalities and inequalities (<, ≤, =, >, ≥) and experimentally compare this algorithm, called IEDyn, to state of the art CER systems as well as incremental view maintenance engines. IEDyn performs consistently better than the competitor systems with up to two orders of magnitude improvements in both time and memory consumption.

Acyclic Gambling Games

We consider 2-player zero-sum stochastic games where each player controls his own state variable living in a compact metric space. The terminology comes from gambling problems where the state of a player represents its wealth in a casino. Under natural assumptions (such as continuous running payoff and non expansive transitions), we consider for each discount factor the value vλ of the λ-discounted stochastic game and investigate its limit when λ goes to 0 (players are more and more patient). We show that under a new acyclicity condition, the limit exists and is characterized as the unique solution of a system of functional equations: the limit is the unique continuous excessive and depressive function such that each player, if his opponent does not move, can reach the zone when the current payoff is at least as good than the limit value, without degrading the limit value. The approach generalizes and provides a new viewpoint on the Mertens-Zamir system coming from the study of zero-sum repeated games with lack of information on both sides. A counterexample shows that under a slightly weaker notion of acyclicity, convergence of (vλ) may fail.

Semantic Optimization in Tractable Classes of Conjunctive Queries

This paper reports on recent advances in semantic query optimization. We focus on the core class of conjunctive queries (CQs). Since CQ evaluation is NP-complete, a long line of research has concentrated on identifying fragments of CQs that can be efficiently evaluated. One of the most general such restrictions corresponds to bounded generalized hypertreewidth, which extends the notion of acyclicity. Here we discuss the problem of reformulating a CQ into one of bounded generalized hypertreewidth. Furthermore, we study whether knowing that such a reformulation exists alleviates the cost of CQ evaluation. In case a CQ cannot be reformulated as one of bounded generalized hypertreewidth, we discuss how it can be approximated in an optimal way. All the above issues are examined both for the constraint-free case, and the case where constraints, in fact, tuple-generating and equality-generating dependencies, are present

A Zariski-local notion of F-total acyclicity for complexes of sheaves

We study a notion of total acyclicity for complexes of flat sheaves over a scheme. It is Zariski-local—i.e. it can be verified on any open affine covering of the scheme—and for sheaves over a quasi-compact semi-separated scheme it agrees with the categorical notion. In particular, it agrees, in their setting, with the notion studied by Murfet and Salarian for sheaves over a noetherian semi-separated scheme. As part of the study we recover, and in several cases extend the validity of, recent results on existence of covers and precovers in categories of sheaves. One consequence is the existence of an adjoint to the inclusion of these totally acyclic complexes into the homotopy category of complexes of flat sheaves.

Hypergraph Acyclicity Revisited

The notion of graph acyclicity has been extended to several notions of hypergraph acyclicity. In increasing order of generality: gamma acyclicity, beta acyclicity, and alpha acyclicity have met a great interest in many fields. For each notion, we prove the equivalence between the numerous characterizations with a new, simpler proof, in a self-contained manner. For that purpose, we introduce new notions of alpha, beta, and gamma leaf that allow one to define new “rule-based” characterizations of each notion. The combined presentation of the notions is completed with a study of their respective closure properties. New closure results are established, and alpha, beta, and gamma acyclicity are proved optimal w.r.t. their closure properties.

Semantic Acyclicity on Graph Databases

It is known that unions of acyclic conjunctive queries (CQs) can be evaluated in linear time, as opposed to arbitrary CQs, for which the evaluation problem is NP-complete. It follows from techniques in the area of constraint-satisfaction problems that semantically acyclic unions of CQs---i.e., unions of CQs that are equivalent to a union of acyclic ones---can be evaluated in polynomial time, though testing membership in the class of semantically acyclic CQs is NP-complete. We study here the fundamental notion of semantic acyclicity in the context of graph databases and unions of conjunctive regular path queries with inverse (UC2RPQs). It is known that unions of acyclic C2RPQs can be evaluated efficiently, but it is by no means obvious whether similarly good evaluation properties hold for the class of UC2RPQs that are semantically acyclic. We prove that checking whether a UC2RPQ is semantically acyclic is Expspace-complete and obtain as a corollary that evaluation of semantically acyclic UC2RPQs is fixed-p...

On High-Dimensional Acyclic Tournaments

We study a high-dimensional analog for the notion of an acyclic (aka transitive) tournament. We give upper and lower bounds on the number of $d$-dimensional $n$-vertex acyclic tournaments. In addition, we prove that every $n$-vertex $d$-dimensional tournament contains an acyclic subtournament of $\Omega(\log^{1/d}n)$ vertices and the bound is tight. This statement for tournaments (i.e., the case $d=1$) is a well-known fact. We indicate a connection between acyclic high-dimensional tournaments and Ramsey numbers of hypergraphs. We investigate as well the inter-relations among various other notions of acyclicity in high-dimensional to tournaments. These include combinatorial, geometric and topological concepts.

Description Logic Knowledge and Action Bases

Description logic Knowledge and Action Bases (KAB) are a mechanism for providing both a semantically rich representation of the information on the domain of interest in terms of a description logic knowledge base and actions to change such information over time, possibly introducing new objects. We resort to a variant of DL-Lite where the unique name assumption is not enforced and where equality between objects may be asserted and inferred. Actions are specified as sets of conditional effects, where conditions are based on epistemic queries over the knowledge base (TBox and ABox), and effects are expressed in terms of new ABoxes. In this setting, we address verification of temporal properties expressed in a variant of first-order mu-calculus with quantification across states. Notably, we show decidability of verification, under a suitable restriction inspired by the notion of weak acyclicity in data exchange.

Some characterizations of γ and β-acyclicity of hypergraphs

The notions of γ and β-acyclicity are two classic generalizations of the acyclicity of graphs to hypergraphs. They satisfy the property that, if a hypergraph is γ-acyclic then it is β-acyclic, and the reverse is false. We give some new properties concerning these notions. First we show that we can strictly insert another notion of acyclicity between them, namely the fact of having a join tree with disjoint branches. And if we add a condition on the existence of such a join tree, we obtain a notion equivalent to γ-acyclicity. Then we present two characterizations, consisting in applying successively a small set of rules, deciding γ and β-acyclicity respectively.

Totally acyclic complexes over noetherian schemes

We define a notion of total acyclicity for complexes of flat quasi-coherent sheaves on a semi-separated noetherian scheme, and study these complexes using the pure derived category of flat quasi-coherent sheaves. We prove that a scheme is Gorenstein if and only if every acyclic complex of flat quasi-coherent sheaves is totally acyclic. Our formalism also removes the need for a dualising complex in several known results for rings, including Jørgensen's proof of the existence of Gorenstein projective precovers.

On the notion of cycles in hypergraphs

The notion of hypergraph cyclicity is crucial in numerous fields of application of hypergraph theory (e.g. in computer science, in relational database theory and constraint programming). Surprisingly, while this notion has been well studied during last thirty years, no relevant definition of cycles in hypergraphs has been proposed by the community. In this paper, we propose a definition of cycles in hypergraphs, α -cycle based on the same principle in graph theory, meaning that a hypergraph is acyclic iff it does not contain an α -cycle. This result completes the theory of the mostly used notion of hypergraph acyclicity, the α -acyclicity.

Rationalizability of choice functions on general domains without full transitivity

The rationalizability of a choice function by means of a transitive relation has been analyzed thoroughly in the literature. However, not much seems to be known when transitivity is weakened to quasi-transitivity or acyclicity. Such weakenings are particularly relevant in the context of social choice. We describe the logical relationships between the different notions of rationalizability involving, for example, the transitivity, quasi-transitivity, or acyclicity of the rationalizing relation. Furthermore, we discuss sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for rational choice on arbitrary domains. Transitive, quasi-transitive, and acyclical rationalizability are fully characterized for domains that contain all singletons and all two-element subsets of the universal set.

Robbers, marshals, and guards: game theoretic and logical characterizations of hypertree width

In a previous paper (J. Comput. System Sci. 64 (2002) 519), the authors introduced the notion of hypertree decomposition and the corresponding concept of hypertree width and showed that the conjunctive queries whose hypergraphs have bounded hypertree width can be evaluated in polynomial time. Bounded hypertree width generalizes the notions of acyclicity and bounded treewidth and corresponds to larger classes of tractable queries. In the present paper, we provide natural characterizations of hypergraphs and queries having bounded hypertree width in terms of game-theory and logic. First we define the Robber and Marshals game, and prove that a hypergraph H has hypertree width at most k if and only if k marshals have a winning strategy on H, allowing them to trap a robber who moves along the hyperedges. This game is akin the well-known Robber and Cops game (which characterizes bounded treewidth), except that marshals are more powerful than cops: They can control entire hyperedges instead of just vertices. Kolaitis and Vardi (J. Comput. System Sci. 61 (2000) 302) recently gave an elegant characterization of the conjunctive queries having treewidth < k in terms of the k-variable fragment of a certain logic L (=existential-conjunctive fragment of positive FO). We use the Robber and Marshals game to derive a surprisingly simple and equally elegant characterization of the class HW[ k] of queries of hypertree width at most k in terms of guarded logic. In particular, we show that HW[ k]= GF k (L), where GF k (L) denotes the k-guarded fragment of L. In this fragment, conjunctions of k atoms rather than just single atoms are allowed to act as guards. Note that, for the particular case k=1, our results provide new characterizations of the class of acyclic queries. We extend the notion of bounded hypertree width to nonrecursive stratified Datalog and show that the k-guarded fragment GF k (FO) of first-order logic has the same expressive power as nonrecursive stratified Datalog of hypertree width at most k.

Query evaluation via tree-decompositions

A number of efficient methods for evaluating first-order and monadic-second order queries on finite relational structures are based on tree-decompositions of structures or queries. We systematically study these methods.In the first part of the article, we consider arbitrary formulas on tree-like structures. We generalize a theorem of Courcelle [1990] by showing that on structures of bounded tree-width a monadic second-order formula (with free first- and second-order variables) can be evaluated in time linear in the structure size plus the size of the output.In the second part, we study tree-like formulas on arbitrary structures. We generalize the notions of acyclicity and bounded tree-width from conjunctive queries to arbitrary first-order formulas in a straightforward way and analyze the complexity of evaluating formulas of these fragments. Moreover, we show that the acyclic and bounded tree-width fragments have the same expressive power as the well-known guarded fragment and the finite-variable fragments of first-order logic, respectively.

Conjunctive query containment revisited

We consider the problems of conjunctive query containment and minimization, which are known to be NP-complete, and show that these problems can be solved in polynomial time for the class of acyclic queries. We then generalize the notion of acyclicity and define a parameter called query width that captures the “degree of cyclicity” of a query: in particular, a query is acyclic if and only if its query width is 1. We give algorithms for containment and minimization that run in time polynomial in n k , where n is the input size and k is the query width. These algorithms naturally generalize those for acyclic queries, and are of practical significance because many queries have small query width compared to their sizes. We show that good bounds on the query width of Q can be obtained using the treewidth of the incidence graph of Q. We then consider the problem of finding an equivalent query to a given conjunctive query Q that has the least number of subgoals. We show that a polynomial-time approximation algorithm is unlikely for this problem. Finally, we apply our containment algorithm to the practically important problem of finding equivalent rewritings of a query using a set of materialized views.