Fast Algorithms for Relational Marginal Polytopes

We study the problem of constructing the relational marginal polytope (RMP) of a given set of first-order formulas. Past work has shown that the RMP construction problem can be reduced to weighted first-order model counting (WFOMC). However, existing reductions in the literature are intractable in practice, since they typically require an infeasibly large number of calls to a WFOMC oracle. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to construct RMPs using fewer oracle calls. As an application, we also show how to apply this new algorithm to improve an existing approximation scheme for WFOMC. We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approaches experimentally, and find that our method provides speed-ups over the baseline for RMP construction of a full order of magnitude.

The construction problem for Hodge numbers modulo an integer in positive characteristic

Let k be an algebraically closed field of positive characteristic. For any integer $m\ge 2$ , we show that the Hodge numbers of a smooth projective k-variety can take on any combination of values modulo m, subject only to Serre duality. In particular, there are no non-trivial polynomial relations between the Hodge numbers.