172 research outputs found
A Birthday Repetition Theorem and Complexity of Approximating Dense CSPs
A -birthday repetition of a
two-prover game is a game in which the two provers are sent
random sets of questions from of sizes and respectively.
These two sets are sampled independently uniformly among all sets of questions
of those particular sizes. We prove the following birthday repetition theorem:
when satisfies some mild conditions, decreases exponentially in where is the total number of
questions. Our result positively resolves an open question posted by Aaronson,
Impagliazzo and Moshkovitz (CCC 2014).
As an application of our birthday repetition theorem, we obtain new
fine-grained hardness of approximation results for dense CSPs. Specifically, we
establish a tight trade-off between running time and approximation ratio for
dense CSPs by showing conditional lower bounds, integrality gaps and
approximation algorithms. In particular, for any sufficiently large and for
every , we show the following results:
- We exhibit an -approximation algorithm for dense Max -CSPs
with alphabet size via -level of Sherali-Adams relaxation.
- Through our birthday repetition theorem, we obtain an integrality gap of
for -level Lasserre relaxation for fully-dense Max
-CSP.
- Assuming that there is a constant such that Max 3SAT cannot
be approximated to within of the optimal in sub-exponential
time, our birthday repetition theorem implies that any algorithm that
approximates fully-dense Max -CSP to within a factor takes
time, almost tightly matching the algorithmic
result based on Sherali-Adams relaxation.Comment: 45 page
Limitations of Algebraic Approaches to Graph Isomorphism Testing
We investigate the power of graph isomorphism algorithms based on algebraic
reasoning techniques like Gr\"obner basis computation. The idea of these
algorithms is to encode two graphs into a system of equations that are
satisfiable if and only if if the graphs are isomorphic, and then to (try to)
decide satisfiability of the system using, for example, the Gr\"obner basis
algorithm. In some cases this can be done in polynomial time, in particular, if
the equations admit a bounded degree refutation in an algebraic proof systems
such as Nullstellensatz or polynomial calculus. We prove linear lower bounds on
the polynomial calculus degree over all fields of characteristic different from
2 and also linear lower bounds for the degree of Positivstellensatz calculus
derivations.
We compare this approach to recently studied linear and semidefinite
programming approaches to isomorphism testing, which are known to be related to
the combinatorial Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm. We exactly characterise the
power of the Weisfeiler-Lehman algorithm in terms of an algebraic proof system
that lies between degree-k Nullstellensatz and degree-k polynomial calculus
Subsampling Mathematical Relaxations and Average-case Complexity
We initiate a study of when the value of mathematical relaxations such as
linear and semidefinite programs for constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) is
approximately preserved when restricting the instance to a sub-instance induced
by a small random subsample of the variables. Let be a family of CSPs such
as 3SAT, Max-Cut, etc., and let be a relaxation for , in the sense
that for every instance , is an upper bound the maximum
fraction of satisfiable constraints of . Loosely speaking, we say that
subsampling holds for and if for every sufficiently dense instance and every , if we let be the instance obtained by
restricting to a sufficiently large constant number of variables, then
. We say that weak subsampling holds if the
above guarantee is replaced with whenever
. We show: 1. Subsampling holds for the BasicLP and BasicSDP
programs. BasicSDP is a variant of the relaxation considered by Raghavendra
(2008), who showed it gives an optimal approximation factor for every CSP under
the unique games conjecture. BasicLP is the linear programming analog of
BasicSDP. 2. For tighter versions of BasicSDP obtained by adding additional
constraints from the Lasserre hierarchy, weak subsampling holds for CSPs of
unique games type. 3. There are non-unique CSPs for which even weak subsampling
fails for the above tighter semidefinite programs. Also there are unique CSPs
for which subsampling fails for the Sherali-Adams linear programming hierarchy.
As a corollary of our weak subsampling for strong semidefinite programs, we
obtain a polynomial-time algorithm to certify that random geometric graphs (of
the type considered by Feige and Schechtman, 2002) of max-cut value
have a cut value at most .Comment: Includes several more general results that subsume the previous
version of the paper
Faster SDP hierarchy solvers for local rounding algorithms
Convex relaxations based on different hierarchies of linear/semi-definite
programs have been used recently to devise approximation algorithms for various
optimization problems. The approximation guarantee of these algorithms improves
with the number of {\em rounds} in the hierarchy, though the complexity of
solving (or even writing down the solution for) the 'th level program grows
as where is the input size.
In this work, we observe that many of these algorithms are based on {\em
local} rounding procedures that only use a small part of the SDP solution (of
size instead of ). We give an algorithm to
find the requisite portion in time polynomial in its size. The challenge in
achieving this is that the required portion of the solution is not fixed a
priori but depends on other parts of the solution, sometimes in a complicated
iterative manner.
Our solver leads to time algorithms to obtain the same
guarantees in many cases as the earlier time algorithms based on
rounds of the Lasserre hierarchy. In particular, guarantees based on rounds can be realized in polynomial time.
We develop and describe our algorithm in a fairly general abstract framework.
The main technical tool in our work, which might be of independent interest in
convex optimization, is an efficient ellipsoid algorithm based separation
oracle for convex programs that can output a {\em certificate of infeasibility
with restricted support}. This is used in a recursive manner to find a sequence
of consistent points in nested convex bodies that "fools" local rounding
algorithms.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figure
Lower bounds on the size of semidefinite programming relaxations
We introduce a method for proving lower bounds on the efficacy of
semidefinite programming (SDP) relaxations for combinatorial problems. In
particular, we show that the cut, TSP, and stable set polytopes on -vertex
graphs are not the linear image of the feasible region of any SDP (i.e., any
spectrahedron) of dimension less than , for some constant .
This result yields the first super-polynomial lower bounds on the semidefinite
extension complexity of any explicit family of polytopes.
Our results follow from a general technique for proving lower bounds on the
positive semidefinite rank of a matrix. To this end, we establish a close
connection between arbitrary SDPs and those arising from the sum-of-squares SDP
hierarchy. For approximating maximum constraint satisfaction problems, we prove
that SDPs of polynomial-size are equivalent in power to those arising from
degree- sum-of-squares relaxations. This result implies, for instance,
that no family of polynomial-size SDP relaxations can achieve better than a
7/8-approximation for MAX-3-SAT
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