Satisfiable Tseitin Formulas Are Hard for Nondeterministic Read-Once Branching Programs

We consider satisfiable Tseitin formulas TS_{G,c} based on d-regular expanders G with the absolute value of the second largest eigenvalue less than d/3. We prove that any nondeterministic read-once branching program (1-NBP) representing TS_{G,c} has size 2^{Omega(n)}, where n is the number of vertices in G. It extends the recent result by Itsykson at el. [STACS 2017] from OBDD to 1-NBP. On the other hand it is easy to see that TS_{G,c} can be represented as a read-2 branching program (2-BP) of size O(n), as the negation of a nondeterministic read-once branching program (1-coNBP) of size O(n) and as a CNF formula of size O(n). Thus TS_{G,c} gives the best possible separations (up to a constant in the exponent) between 1-NBP and 2-BP, 1-NBP and 1-coNBP and between 1-NBP and CNF

Proof Complexity Meets Algebra

We analyse how the standard reductions between constraint satisfaction problems affect their proof complexity. We show that, for the most studied propositional and semi-algebraic proof systems, the classical constructions of pp-interpretability, homomorphic equivalence and addition of constants to a core preserve the proof complexity of the CSP. As a result, for those proof systems, the classes of constraint languages for which small unsatisfiability certificates exist can be characterised algebraically. We illustrate our results by a gap theorem saying that a constraint language either has resolution refutations of bounded width, or does not have bounded-depth Frege refutations of subexponential size. The former holds exactly for the widely studied class of constraint languages of bounded width. This class is also known to coincide with the class of languages with Sums-of-Squares refutations of sublinear degree, a fact for which we provide an alternative proof. We hence ask for the existence of a natural proof system with good behaviour with respect to reductions and simultaneously small size refutations beyond bounded width. We give an example of such a proof system by showing that bounded-degree Lovasz-Schrijver satisfies both requirements

Proof Complexity and Beyond

Proof complexity is a multi-disciplinary intellectual endeavor that addresses questions of the general form “how difficult is it to prove certain mathematical facts?” The current workshop focused on recent advances in our understanding of logic-based proof systems and on connections to algorithms, geometry and combinatorics research, such as the analysis of approximation algorithms, or the size of linear or semidefinite programming formulations of combinatorial optimization problems, to name just two important examples

Hard examples for bounded depth Frege

We prove exponential lower bounds on the size of a bounded depth Frege proof of a Tseitin graph-based contradiction, whenever the underlying graph is an expander. This is the rst example of a contradiction, naturally formalized as a 3-CNF, that has no short bounded depth Frege proofs. Previously, lower bounds of this type were known only for the pigeonhole principle [18, 17], and for Tseitin contradictions based on complete graphs [19]. Our proof is a novel reduction of a Tseitin formula of an expander graph to the pigeonhole principle, in a manner resembling that done by Fu and Urquhart [19] for complete graphs. In the proof we introduce a general method for removing extension variables without signicantly increasing the proof size, which may b