1,139 research outputs found
Formulas vs. Circuits for Small Distance Connectivity
We give the first super-polynomial separation in the power of bounded-depth
boolean formulas vs. circuits. Specifically, we consider the problem Distance
Connectivity, which asks whether two specified nodes in a graph of size
are connected by a path of length at most . This problem is solvable
(by the recursive doubling technique) on {\bf circuits} of depth
and size . In contrast, we show that solving this problem on {\bf
formulas} of depth requires size for all . As corollaries:
(i) It follows that polynomial-size circuits for Distance Connectivity
require depth for all . This matches the
upper bound from recursive doubling and improves a previous lower bound of Beame, Pitassi and Impagliazzo [BIP98].
(ii) We get a tight lower bound of on the size required to
simulate size- depth- circuits by depth- formulas for all and . No lower bound better than
was previously known for any .
Our proof technique is centered on a new notion of pathset complexity, which
roughly speaking measures the minimum cost of constructing a set of (partial)
paths in a universe of size via the operations of union and relational
join, subject to certain density constraints. Half of our proof shows that
bounded-depth formulas solving Distance Connectivity imply upper bounds
on pathset complexity. The other half is a combinatorial lower bound on pathset
complexity
Near-optimal small-depth lower bounds for small distance connectivity
We show that any depth- circuit for determining whether an -node graph
has an -to- path of length at most must have size
. The previous best circuit size lower bounds for this
problem were (due to Beame, Impagliazzo, and Pitassi
[BIP98]) and (following from a recent formula size
lower bound of Rossman [Ros14]). Our lower bound is quite close to optimal,
since a simple construction gives depth- circuits of size
for this problem (and strengthening our bound even to
would require proving that undirected connectivity is not in )
Our proof is by reduction to a new lower bound on the size of small-depth
circuits computing a skewed variant of the "Sipser functions" that have played
an important role in classical circuit lower bounds [Sip83, Yao85, H{\aa}s86].
A key ingredient in our proof of the required lower bound for these Sipser-like
functions is the use of \emph{random projections}, an extension of random
restrictions which were recently employed in [RST15]. Random projections allow
us to obtain sharper quantitative bounds while employing simpler arguments,
both conceptually and technically, than in the previous works [Ajt89, BPU92,
BIP98, Ros14]
On the Succinctness of Query Rewriting over OWL 2 QL Ontologies with Shallow Chases
We investigate the size of first-order rewritings of conjunctive queries over
OWL 2 QL ontologies of depth 1 and 2 by means of hypergraph programs computing
Boolean functions. Both positive and negative results are obtained. Conjunctive
queries over ontologies of depth 1 have polynomial-size nonrecursive datalog
rewritings; tree-shaped queries have polynomial positive existential
rewritings; however, in the worst case, positive existential rewritings can
only be of superpolynomial size. Positive existential and nonrecursive datalog
rewritings of queries over ontologies of depth 2 suffer an exponential blowup
in the worst case, while first-order rewritings are superpolynomial unless
. We also analyse rewritings of
tree-shaped queries over arbitrary ontologies and observe that the query
entailment problem for such queries is fixed-parameter tractable
Monotone Projection Lower Bounds from Extended Formulation Lower Bounds
In this short note, we reduce lower bounds on monotone projections of
polynomials to lower bounds on extended formulations of polytopes. Applying our
reduction to the seminal extended formulation lower bounds of Fiorini, Massar,
Pokutta, Tiwari, & de Wolf (STOC 2012; J. ACM, 2015) and Rothvoss (STOC 2014;
J. ACM, 2017), we obtain the following interesting consequences.
1. The Hamiltonian Cycle polynomial is not a monotone subexponential-size
projection of the permanent; this both rules out a natural attempt at a
monotone lower bound on the Boolean permanent, and shows that the permanent is
not complete for non-negative polynomials in VNP under monotone
p-projections.
2. The cut polynomials and the perfect matching polynomial (or "unsigned
Pfaffian") are not monotone p-projections of the permanent. The latter, over
the Boolean and-or semi-ring, rules out monotone reductions in one of the
natural approaches to reducing perfect matchings in general graphs to perfect
matchings in bipartite graphs.
As the permanent is universal for monotone formulas, these results also imply
exponential lower bounds on the monotone formula size and monotone circuit size
of these polynomials.Comment: Published in Theory of Computing, Volume 13 (2017), Article 18;
Received: November 10, 2015, Revised: July 27, 2016, Published: December 22,
201
Lower Bounds for (Non-Monotone) Comparator Circuits
Comparator circuits are a natural circuit model for studying the concept of bounded fan-out computations, which intuitively corresponds to whether or not a computational model can make "copies" of intermediate computational steps. Comparator circuits are believed to be weaker than general Boolean circuits, but they can simulate Branching Programs and Boolean formulas. In this paper we prove the first superlinear lower bounds in the general (non-monotone) version of this model for an explicitly defined function. More precisely, we prove that the n-bit Element Distinctness function requires ?((n/ log n)^(3/2)) size comparator circuits
Small Extended Formulation for Knapsack Cover Inequalities from Monotone Circuits
Initially developed for the min-knapsack problem, the knapsack cover
inequalities are used in the current best relaxations for numerous
combinatorial optimization problems of covering type. In spite of their
widespread use, these inequalities yield linear programming (LP) relaxations of
exponential size, over which it is not known how to optimize exactly in
polynomial time. In this paper we address this issue and obtain LP relaxations
of quasi-polynomial size that are at least as strong as that given by the
knapsack cover inequalities.
For the min-knapsack cover problem, our main result can be stated formally as
follows: for any , there is a -size LP relaxation with an integrality gap of at most ,
where is the number of items. Prior to this work, there was no known
relaxation of subexponential size with a constant upper bound on the
integrality gap.
Our construction is inspired by a connection between extended formulations
and monotone circuit complexity via Karchmer-Wigderson games. In particular,
our LP is based on -depth monotone circuits with fan-in~ for
evaluating weighted threshold functions with inputs, as constructed by
Beimel and Weinreb. We believe that a further understanding of this connection
may lead to more positive results complementing the numerous lower bounds
recently proved for extended formulations.Comment: 21 page
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