Prefix Discrepancy, Smoothed Analysis, and Combinatorial Vector Balancing
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A well-known result of Banaszczyk in discrepancy theory concerns the prefix discrepancy problem (also known as the signed series problem): given a sequence of T unit vectors in ℝ^d, find ± signs for each of them such that the signed sum vector along any prefix has a small ℓ_∞-norm? This problem is central to proving upper bounds for the Steinitz problem, and the popular Komlós problem is a special case where one is only concerned with the final signed sum vector instead of all prefixes. Banaszczyk gave an O(√(log d+ log T)) bound for the prefix discrepancy problem. We investigate the tightness of Banaszczyk's bound and consider natural generalizations of prefix discrepancy: We first consider a smoothed analysis setting, where a small amount of additive noise perturbs the input vectors. We show an exponential improvement in T compared to Banaszczyk's bound. Using a primal-dual approach and a careful chaining argument, we show that one can achieve a bound of O(√(log d+ loglog T)) with high probability in the smoothed setting. Moreover, this smoothed analysis bound is the best possible without further improvement on Banaszczyk's bound in the worst case. We also introduce a generalization of the prefix discrepancy problem where the discrepancy constraints correspond to paths on a DAG on T vertices. We show that an analog of Banaszczyk's O(√(log d+ log T)) bound continues to hold in this setting for adversarially given unit vectors and that the √(log T) factor is unavoidable for DAGs. We also show that the dependence on T cannot be improved significantly in the smoothed case for DAGs. We conclude by exploring a more general notion of vector balancing, which we call combinatorial vector balancing. We obtain near-optimal bounds in this setting, up to poly-logarithmic factors.
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