k-server via multiscale entropic regularization

© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). We present an O((log k)2)-competitive randomized algorithm for the k-server problem on hierarchically separated trees (HSTs). This is the first o(k)-competitive randomized algorithm for which the competitive ratio is independent of the size of the underl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Bubeck, Sébastien, Cohen, Michael B., Lee, Yin Tat, Lee, James R., Mądry, Aleksander
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2021
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/137726
Description
Summary:© 2018 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). We present an O((log k)2)-competitive randomized algorithm for the k-server problem on hierarchically separated trees (HSTs). This is the first o(k)-competitive randomized algorithm for which the competitive ratio is independent of the size of the underlying HST. Our algorithm is designed in the framework of online mirror descent where the mirror map is a multiscale entropy. When combined with Bartal’s static HST embedding reduction, this leads to an O((log k)2 log n)-competitive algorithm on any n-point metric space. We give a new dynamic HST embedding that yields an O((log k)3 log ∆)-competitive algorithm on any metric space where the ratio of the largest to smallest non-zero distance is at most ∆.