Kishen N Gowda

Kishen N Gowda, Willem Fletcher, MohammadHossein Bateni et al.

Hierarchical Agglomerative Clustering (HAC) is a widely-used clustering method based on repeatedly merging the closest pair of clusters, where inter-cluster distances are determined by a linkage function. Unlike many clustering methods, HAC does not optimize a single explicit global objective; clustering quality is therefore primarily evaluated empirically, and the choice of linkage function plays a crucial role in practice. However, popular classical linkages, such as single-linkage, average-linkage and Ward's method show high variability across real-world datasets and do not consistently produce high-quality clusterings in practice. In this paper, we propose \emph{Chamfer-linkage}, a novel linkage function that measures the distance between clusters using the Chamfer distance, a popular notion of distance between point-clouds in machine learning and computer vision. We argue that Chamfer-linkage satisfies desirable concept representation properties that other popular measures struggle to satisfy. Theoretically, we show that Chamfer-linkage HAC can be implemented in $O(n^2)$ time, matching the efficiency of classical linkage functions. Experimentally, we find that Chamfer-linkage consistently yields higher-quality clusterings than classical linkages such as average-linkage and Ward's method across a diverse collection of datasets. Our results establish Chamfer-linkage as a practical drop-in replacement for classical linkage functions, broadening the toolkit for hierarchical clustering in both theory and practice.

Kishen N Gowda, D Ellis Hershkowitz, Richard Z Huang et al.

Allocating $m$ indivisible goods among $n$ agents is a fundamental task in fair division. Recent work of Garg and Psomas [AAMAS 2025] initiated the study of parallel algorithms for envy-free up to one good (EF1) allocations, giving NC algorithms for $2$ and $3$ agents. They also showed CC-hardness results for simulating the classic Round Robin algorithm for EF1 allocations, even when each agent values at most $3$ goods and each good is valued by at most $3$ agents. We strengthen these results. For the case of $2$ agents, we quadratically improve the depth from $O(\log ^ 2 m) $ to $O(\log m)$ and the work from $O(m \log m)$ to $O(m)$. Furthermore, we significantly generalize beyond $3$ agents by giving NC algorithms for any constant number of agents. We also give randomized algorithms with depth $\tilde{O}(m/n)$ and polynomial work. As corollaries of these results, we obtain NC algorithms whenever each agent values at most $polylog(m)$ goods and each good is valued by at most $O(1)$ agents, and RNC algorithms when each agent values at most $polylog(m)$ goods. As such, our algorithms bypass the CC-hardness of Garg and Psomas by not simulating Round Robin. We also complement the aforementioned CC-hardness by showing the CC-completeness of simulating Round Robin. Lastly, beyond EF1 allocations, we show that computing envy-free up to $k$ goods allocations is possible for $k \approx \sqrt{m}$ in RNC, or $k = m^{\varepsilon}$ in sublinear depth for any constant $\varepsilon > 0$.