974 research outputs found
Improved Hardness of Approximating Chromatic Number
We prove that for sufficiently large K, it is NP-hard to color K-colorable
graphs with less than 2^{K^{1/3}} colors. This improves the previous result of
K versus K^{O(log K)} in Khot [14]
Approximate Graph Coloring by Semidefinite Programming
We consider the problem of coloring k-colorable graphs with the fewest
possible colors. We present a randomized polynomial time algorithm that colors
a 3-colorable graph on vertices with min O(Delta^{1/3} log^{1/2} Delta log
n), O(n^{1/4} log^{1/2} n) colors where Delta is the maximum degree of any
vertex. Besides giving the best known approximation ratio in terms of n, this
marks the first non-trivial approximation result as a function of the maximum
degree Delta. This result can be generalized to k-colorable graphs to obtain a
coloring using min O(Delta^{1-2/k} log^{1/2} Delta log n), O(n^{1-3/(k+1)}
log^{1/2} n) colors. Our results are inspired by the recent work of Goemans and
Williamson who used an algorithm for semidefinite optimization problems, which
generalize linear programs, to obtain improved approximations for the MAX CUT
and MAX 2-SAT problems. An intriguing outcome of our work is a duality
relationship established between the value of the optimum solution to our
semidefinite program and the Lovasz theta-function. We show lower bounds on the
gap between the optimum solution of our semidefinite program and the actual
chromatic number; by duality this also demonstrates interesting new facts about
the theta-function
NP-hardness of circuit minimization for multi-output functions
Can we design efficient algorithms for finding fast algorithms? This question is captured by various circuit minimization problems, and algorithms for the corresponding tasks have significant practical applications. Following the work of Cook and Levin in the early 1970s, a central question is whether minimizing the circuit size of an explicitly given function is NP-complete. While this is known to hold in restricted models such as DNFs, making progress with respect to more expressive classes of circuits has been elusive.
In this work, we establish the first NP-hardness result for circuit minimization of total functions in the setting of general (unrestricted) Boolean circuits. More precisely, we show that computing the minimum circuit size of a given multi-output Boolean function f : {0,1}^n ? {0,1}^m is NP-hard under many-one polynomial-time randomized reductions. Our argument builds on a simpler NP-hardness proof for the circuit minimization problem for (single-output) Boolean functions under an extended set of generators.
Complementing these results, we investigate the computational hardness of minimizing communication. We establish that several variants of this problem are NP-hard under deterministic reductions. In particular, unless ? = ??, no polynomial-time computable function can approximate the deterministic two-party communication complexity of a partial Boolean function up to a polynomial. This has consequences for the class of structural results that one might hope to show about the communication complexity of partial functions
On Coloring Resilient Graphs
We introduce a new notion of resilience for constraint satisfaction problems,
with the goal of more precisely determining the boundary between NP-hardness
and the existence of efficient algorithms for resilient instances. In
particular, we study -resiliently -colorable graphs, which are those
-colorable graphs that remain -colorable even after the addition of any
new edges. We prove lower bounds on the NP-hardness of coloring resiliently
colorable graphs, and provide an algorithm that colors sufficiently resilient
graphs. We also analyze the corresponding notion of resilience for -SAT.
This notion of resilience suggests an array of open questions for graph
coloring and other combinatorial problems.Comment: Appearing in MFCS 201
Pre-Reduction Graph Products: Hardnesses of Properly Learning DFAs and Approximating EDP on DAGs
The study of graph products is a major research topic and typically concerns
the term , e.g., to show that . In this paper, we
study graph products in a non-standard form where is a
"reduction", a transformation of any graph into an instance of an intended
optimization problem. We resolve some open problems as applications.
(1) A tight -approximation hardness for the minimum
consistent deterministic finite automaton (DFA) problem, where is the
sample size. Due to Board and Pitt [Theoretical Computer Science 1992], this
implies the hardness of properly learning DFAs assuming (the
weakest possible assumption).
(2) A tight hardness for the edge-disjoint paths (EDP)
problem on directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where denotes the number of
vertices.
(3) A tight hardness of packing vertex-disjoint -cycles for large .
(4) An alternative (and perhaps simpler) proof for the hardness of properly
learning DNF, CNF and intersection of halfspaces [Alekhnovich et al., FOCS 2004
and J. Comput.Syst.Sci. 2008]
Approximating the Orthogonality Dimension of Graphs and Hypergraphs
A t-dimensional orthogonal representation of a hypergraph is an assignment of nonzero vectors in R^t to its vertices, such that every hyperedge contains two vertices whose vectors are orthogonal. The orthogonality dimension of a hypergraph H, denoted by overline{xi}(H), is the smallest integer t for which there exists a t-dimensional orthogonal representation of H. In this paper we study computational aspects of the orthogonality dimension of graphs and hypergraphs. We prove that for every k >= 4, it is NP-hard (resp. quasi-NP-hard) to distinguish n-vertex k-uniform hypergraphs H with overline{xi}(H) = Omega(log^delta n) for some constant delta>0 (resp. overline{xi}(H) >= Omega(log^{1-o(1)} n)). For graphs, we relate the NP-hardness of approximating the orthogonality dimension to a variant of a long-standing conjecture of Stahl. We also consider the algorithmic problem in which given a graph G with overline{xi}(G) <= 3 the goal is to find an orthogonal representation of G of as low dimension as possible, and provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm based on semidefinite programming
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