4 research outputs found
Membership in moment polytopes is in NP and coNP
We show that the problem of deciding membership in the moment polytope
associated with a finite-dimensional unitary representation of a compact,
connected Lie group is in NP and coNP. This is the first non-trivial result on
the computational complexity of this problem, which naively amounts to a
quadratically-constrained program. Our result applies in particular to the
Kronecker polytopes, and therefore to the problem of deciding positivity of the
stretched Kronecker coefficients. In contrast, it has recently been shown that
deciding positivity of a single Kronecker coefficient is NP-hard in general
[Ikenmeyer, Mulmuley and Walter, arXiv:1507.02955]. We discuss the consequences
of our work in the context of complexity theory and the quantum marginal
problem.Comment: 20 page
On vanishing of Kronecker coefficients
We show that the problem of deciding positivity of Kronecker coefficients is
NP-hard. Previously, this problem was conjectured to be in P, just as for the
Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. Our result establishes in a formal way that
Kronecker coefficients are more difficult than Littlewood-Richardson
coefficients, unless P=NP.
We also show that there exists a #P-formula for a particular subclass of
Kronecker coefficients whose positivity is NP-hard to decide. This is an
evidence that, despite the hardness of the positivity problem, there may well
exist a positive combinatorial formula for the Kronecker coefficients. Finding
such a formula is a major open problem in representation theory and algebraic
combinatorics.
Finally, we consider the existence of the partition triples such that the Kronecker coefficient but the
Kronecker coefficient for some integer
. Such "holes" are of great interest as they witness the failure of the
saturation property for the Kronecker coefficients, which is still poorly
understood. Using insight from computational complexity theory, we turn our
hardness proof into a positive result: We show that not only do there exist
many such triples, but they can also be found efficiently. Specifically, we
show that, for any , there exists such that, for all
, there exist partition triples in the
Kronecker cone such that: (a) the Kronecker coefficient
is zero, (b) the height of is , (c) the height of is , and (d) . The proof of the last result
illustrates the effectiveness of the explicit proof strategy of GCT.Comment: 43 pages, 1 figur
Operator scaling with specified marginals
The completely positive maps, a generalization of the nonnegative matrices,
are a well-studied class of maps from matrices to
matrices. The existence of the operator analogues of doubly stochastic scalings
of matrices is equivalent to a multitude of problems in computer science and
mathematics, such rational identity testing in non-commuting variables,
noncommutative rank of symbolic matrices, and a basic problem in invariant
theory (Garg, Gurvits, Oliveira and Wigderson, FOCS, 2016).
We study operator scaling with specified marginals, which is the operator
analogue of scaling matrices to specified row and column sums. We characterize
the operators which can be scaled to given marginals, much in the spirit of the
Gurvits' algorithmic characterization of the operators that can be scaled to
doubly stochastic (Gurvits, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 2004). Our
algorithm produces approximate scalings in time poly(n,m) whenever scalings
exist. A central ingredient in our analysis is a reduction from the specified
marginals setting to the doubly stochastic setting.
Operator scaling with specified marginals arises in diverse areas of study
such as the Brascamp-Lieb inequalities, communication complexity, eigenvalues
of sums of Hermitian matrices, and quantum information theory. Some of the
known theorems in these areas, several of which had no effective proof, are
straightforward consequences of our characterization theorem. For instance, we
obtain a simple algorithm to find, when they exist, a tuple of Hermitian
matrices with given spectra whose sum has a given spectrum. We also prove new
theorems such as a generalization of Forster's theorem (Forster, Journal of
Computer and System Sciences, 2002) concerning radial isotropic position.Comment: 34 pages, 3 page appendi