400 research outputs found
On the Usefulness of Predicates
Motivated by the pervasiveness of strong inapproximability results for
Max-CSPs, we introduce a relaxed notion of an approximate solution of a
Max-CSP. In this relaxed version, loosely speaking, the algorithm is allowed to
replace the constraints of an instance by some other (possibly real-valued)
constraints, and then only needs to satisfy as many of the new constraints as
possible.
To be more precise, we introduce the following notion of a predicate
being \emph{useful} for a (real-valued) objective : given an almost
satisfiable Max- instance, there is an algorithm that beats a random
assignment on the corresponding Max- instance applied to the same sets of
literals. The standard notion of a nontrivial approximation algorithm for a
Max-CSP with predicate is exactly the same as saying that is useful for
itself.
We say that is useless if it is not useful for any . This turns out to
be equivalent to the following pseudo-randomness property: given an almost
satisfiable instance of Max- it is hard to find an assignment such that the
induced distribution on -bit strings defined by the instance is not
essentially uniform.
Under the Unique Games Conjecture, we give a complete and simple
characterization of useful Max-CSPs defined by a predicate: such a Max-CSP is
useless if and only if there is a pairwise independent distribution supported
on the satisfying assignments of the predicate. It is natural to also consider
the case when no negations are allowed in the CSP instance, and we derive a
similar complete characterization (under the UGC) there as well.
Finally, we also include some results and examples shedding additional light
on the approximability of certain Max-CSPs
The power of sum-of-squares for detecting hidden structures
We study planted problems---finding hidden structures in random noisy
inputs---through the lens of the sum-of-squares semidefinite programming
hierarchy (SoS). This family of powerful semidefinite programs has recently
yielded many new algorithms for planted problems, often achieving the best
known polynomial-time guarantees in terms of accuracy of recovered solutions
and robustness to noise. One theme in recent work is the design of spectral
algorithms which match the guarantees of SoS algorithms for planted problems.
Classical spectral algorithms are often unable to accomplish this: the twist in
these new spectral algorithms is the use of spectral structure of matrices
whose entries are low-degree polynomials of the input variables. We prove that
for a wide class of planted problems, including refuting random constraint
satisfaction problems, tensor and sparse PCA, densest-k-subgraph, community
detection in stochastic block models, planted clique, and others, eigenvalues
of degree-d matrix polynomials are as powerful as SoS semidefinite programs of
roughly degree d. For such problems it is therefore always possible to match
the guarantees of SoS without solving a large semidefinite program. Using
related ideas on SoS algorithms and low-degree matrix polynomials (and inspired
by recent work on SoS and the planted clique problem by Barak et al.), we prove
new nearly-tight SoS lower bounds for the tensor and sparse principal component
analysis problems. Our lower bounds for sparse principal component analysis are
the first to suggest that going beyond existing algorithms for this problem may
require sub-exponential time
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