Local Testing for Membership in Lattices

Motivated by the structural analogies between point lattices and linear error-correcting codes, and by the mature theory on locally testable codes, we initiate a systematic study of local testing for membership in lattices. Testing membership in lattices is also motivated in practice, by applications to integer programming, error detection in lattice-based communication, and cryptography. Apart from establishing the conceptual foundations of lattice testing, our results include the following: 1. We demonstrate upper and lower bounds on the query complexity of local testing for the well-known family of code formula lattices. Furthermore, we instantiate our results with code formula lattices constructed from Reed-Muller codes, and obtain nearly-tight bounds. 2. We show that in order to achieve low query complexity, it is sufficient to design one-sided non-adaptive canonical tests. This result is akin to, and based on an analogous result for error-correcting codes due to Ben-Sasson et al. (SIAM J. Computing 35(1) pp1-21)

The Covering Problem

An important endeavor in computer science is to understand the expressive power of logical formalisms over discrete structures, such as words. Naturally, "understanding" is not a mathematical notion. This investigation requires therefore a concrete objective to capture this understanding. In the literature, the standard choice for this objective is the membership problem, whose aim is to find a procedure deciding whether an input regular language can be defined in the logic under investigation. This approach was cemented as the right one by the seminal work of Sch\"utzenberger, McNaughton and Papert on first-order logic and has been in use since then. However, membership questions are hard: for several important fragments, researchers have failed in this endeavor despite decades of investigation. In view of recent results on one of the most famous open questions, namely the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first-order logic, an explanation may be that membership is too restrictive as a setting. These new results were indeed obtained by considering more general problems than membership, taking advantage of the increased flexibility of the enriched mathematical setting. This opens a promising research avenue and efforts have been devoted at identifying and solving such problems for natural fragments. Until now however, these problems have been ad hoc, most fragments relying on a specific one. A unique new problem replacing membership as the right one is still missing. The main contribution of this paper is a suitable candidate to play this role: the Covering Problem. We motivate this problem with 3 arguments. First, it admits an elementary set theoretic formulation, similar to membership. Second, we are able to reexplain or generalize all known results with this problem. Third, we develop a mathematical framework and a methodology tailored to the investigation of this problem

Space-Efficient Data Structures for Lattices

A lattice is a partially-ordered set in which every pair of elements has a unique meet (greatest lower bound) and join (least upper bound). We present new data structures for lattices that are simple, efficient, and nearly optimal in terms of space complexity. Our first data structure can answer partial order queries in constant time and find the meet or join of two elements in $O(n^{3/4})$ time, where $n$ is the number of elements in the lattice. It occupies $O(n^{3/2}\log n)$ bits of space, which is only a $\Theta(\log n)$ factor from the $\Theta(n^{3/2})$-bit lower bound for storing lattices. The preprocessing time is $O(n^2)$. This structure admits a simple space-time tradeoff so that, for any $c \in [\frac{1}{2}, 1]$, the data structure supports meet and join queries in $O(n^{1-c/2})$ time, occupies $O(n^{1+c}\log n)$ bits of space, and can be constructed in $O(n^2 + n^{1+3c/2})$ time. Our second data structure uses $O(n^{3/2}\log n)$ bits of space and supports meet and join in $O(d \frac{\log n}{\log d})$ time, where $d$ is the maximum degree of any element in the transitive reduction graph of the lattice. This structure is much faster for lattices with low-degree elements. This paper also identifies an error in a long-standing solution to the problem of representing lattices. We discuss the issue with this previous work.Comment: Accepted in SWAT 202