Faster FPRAS for the Permanent via Restricted Poincar\'e Inequalities and Coupled Flows
The permanent of an $n\times n$ $0/1$ matrix $A$ equals the number of perfect matchings in the bipartite graph with edges defined by $A$. Jerrum, Sinclair, and Vigoda (2004) presented an FPRAS for approximating the permanent of any nonnegative matrix using a novel simulated-annealing algorithm. The running time was imp...