Commutative Algorithms Approximate the LLL-distribution

Following the groundbreaking Moser-Tardos algorithm for the Lovasz Local Lemma (LLL), a series of works have exploited a key ingredient of the original analysis, the witness tree lemma, in order to: derive deterministic, parallel and distributed algorithms for the LLL, to estimate the entropy of the output distribution, to partially avoid bad events, to deal with super-polynomially many bad events, and even to devise new algorithmic frameworks. Meanwhile, a parallel line of work, has established tools for analyzing stochastic local search algorithms motivated by the LLL that do not fall within the Moser-Tardos framework. Unfortunately, the aforementioned results do not transfer to these more general settings. Mainly, this is because the witness tree lemma, provably, no longer holds. Here we prove that for commutative algorithms, a class recently introduced by Kolmogorov and which captures the vast majority of LLL applications, the witness tree lemma does hold. Armed with this fact, we extend the main result of Haeupler, Saha, and Srinivasan to commutative algorithms, establishing that the output of such algorithms well-approximates the LLL-distribution, i.e., the distribution obtained by conditioning on all bad events being avoided, and give several new applications. For example, we show that the recent algorithm of Molloy for list coloring number of sparse, triangle-free graphs can output exponential many list colorings of the input graph

LIPIcs

The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL) is a powerful tool in probabilistic combinatorics which can be used to establish the existence of objects that satisfy certain properties. The breakthrough paper of Moser and Tardos and follow-up works revealed that the LLL has intimate connections with a class of stochastic local search algorithms for finding such desirable objects. In particular, it can be seen as a sufficient condition for this type of algorithms to converge fast. Besides conditions for existence of and fast convergence to desirable objects, one may naturally ask further questions regarding properties of these algorithms. For instance, "are they parallelizable?", "how many solutions can they output?", "what is the expected "weight" of a solution?", etc. These questions and more have been answered for a class of LLL-inspired algorithms called commutative. In this paper we introduce a new, very natural and more general notion of commutativity (essentially matrix commutativity) which allows us to show a number of new refined properties of LLL-inspired local search algorithms with significantly simpler proofs

Semidefinite optimization in discrepancy theory

Recently, there have been several new developments in discrepancy theory based on connections to semidefinite programming. This connection has been useful in several ways. It gives efficient polynomial time algorithms for several problems for which only non-constructive results were previously known. It also leads to several new structural results in discrepancy itself, such as tightness of the so-called determinant lower bound, improved bounds on the discrepancy of the union of set systems and so on. We will give a brief survey of these results, focussing on the main ideas and the techniques involved