21 research outputs found
On the extension complexity of combinatorial polytopes
In this paper we extend recent results of Fiorini et al. on the extension
complexity of the cut polytope and related polyhedra. We first describe a
lifting argument to show exponential extension complexity for a number of
NP-complete problems including subset-sum and three dimensional matching. We
then obtain a relationship between the extension complexity of the cut polytope
of a graph and that of its graph minors. Using this we are able to show
exponential extension complexity for the cut polytope of a large number of
graphs, including those used in quantum information and suspensions of cubic
planar graphs.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, 2 table
The matching polytope does not admit fully-polynomial size relaxation schemes
The groundbreaking work of Rothvo{\ss} [arxiv:1311.2369] established that
every linear program expressing the matching polytope has an exponential number
of inequalities (formally, the matching polytope has exponential extension
complexity). We generalize this result by deriving strong bounds on the
polyhedral inapproximability of the matching polytope: for fixed , every polyhedral -approximation
requires an exponential number of inequalities, where is the number of
vertices. This is sharp given the well-known -approximation of size
provided by the odd-sets of size up to
. Thus matching is the first problem in , whose natural
linear encoding does not admit a fully polynomial-size relaxation scheme (the
polyhedral equivalent of an FPTAS), which provides a sharp separation from the
polynomial-size relaxation scheme obtained e.g., via constant-sized odd-sets
mentioned above.
Our approach reuses ideas from Rothvo{\ss} [arxiv:1311.2369], however the
main lower bounding technique is different. While the original proof is based
on the hyperplane separation bound (also called the rectangle corruption
bound), we employ the information-theoretic notion of common information as
introduced in Braun and Pokutta [http://eccc.hpi-web.de/report/2013/056/],
which allows to analyze perturbations of slack matrices. It turns out that the
high extension complexity for the matching polytope stem from the same source
of hardness as for the correlation polytope: a direct sum structure.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figure