Year: 2024
Type: preprint
Abstract: In the Generalized Mastermind problem, there is an unknown subset $H$ of the hypercube $\{0,1\}^d$ containing $n$ points. The goal is to learn $H$ by making a few queries to an oracle, which, given a point $q$ in $\{0,1\}^d$, returns the point in $H$ nearest to $q$. We give a two-round adaptive algorithm for this problem that learns $H$ while making at most $\exp(\tilde{O}(\sqrt{d \log n}))$ queries. Furthermore, we show that any $r$-round adaptive randomized algorithm that learns $H$ with constant probability must make $\exp(Ω(d^{3^{-(r-1)}}))$ queries even when the input has $\text{poly}(d)$ points; thus, any $\text{poly}(d)$ query algorithm must necessarily use $Ω(\log \log d)$ rounds of adaptivity. We give optimal query complexity bounds for the variant of the problem where queries are allowed to be from $\{0,1,2\}^d$. We also study a continuous variant of the problem in which $H$ is a subset of unit vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$, and one can query unit vectors in $\mathbb{R}^d$. For this setting, we give an $O(n^{d/2})$ query deterministic algorithm to learn the hidden set of points.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Prabhu, Milind, Woodruff, David
Institutions: University of Michigan, Carnegie Mellon University
Language: English
Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funder: National Science Foundation
OpenAlex ID: W4403623834
