539 research outputs found
Optimal Polynomial-Time Compression for Boolean Max CSP
In the Boolean maximum constraint satisfaction problem - Max CSP(?) - one is given a collection of weighted applications of constraints from a finite constraint language ?, over a common set of variables, and the goal is to assign Boolean values to the variables so that the total weight of satisfied constraints is maximized. There exists a concise dichotomy theorem providing a criterion on ? for the problem to be polynomial-time solvable and stating that otherwise it becomes NP-hard. We study the NP-hard cases through the lens of kernelization and provide a complete characterization of Max CSP(?) with respect to the optimal compression size. Namely, we prove that Max CSP(?) parameterized by the number of variables n is either polynomial-time solvable, or there exists an integer d ? 2 depending on ?, such that:
1) An instance of Max CSP(?) can be compressed into an equivalent instance with ?(n^d log n) bits in polynomial time,
2) Max CSP(?) does not admit such a compression to ?(n^{d-?}) bits unless NP ? co-NP / poly.
Our reductions are based on interpreting constraints as multilinear polynomials combined with the framework of constraint implementations. As another application of our reductions, we reveal tight connections between optimal running times for solving Max CSP(?). More precisely, we show that obtaining a running time of the form ?(2^{(1-?)n}) for particular classes of Max CSPs is as hard as breaching this barrier for Max d-SAT for some d
Optimal Sparsification for Some Binary CSPs Using Low-degree Polynomials
This paper analyzes to what extent it is possible to efficiently reduce the
number of clauses in NP-hard satisfiability problems, without changing the
answer. Upper and lower bounds are established using the concept of
kernelization. Existing results show that if NP is not contained in coNP/poly,
no efficient preprocessing algorithm can reduce n-variable instances of CNF-SAT
with d literals per clause, to equivalent instances with bits for
any e > 0. For the Not-All-Equal SAT problem, a compression to size
exists. We put these results in a common framework by analyzing
the compressibility of binary CSPs. We characterize constraint types based on
the minimum degree of multivariate polynomials whose roots correspond to the
satisfying assignments, obtaining (nearly) matching upper and lower bounds in
several settings. Our lower bounds show that not just the number of
constraints, but also the encoding size of individual constraints plays an
important role. For example, for Exact Satisfiability with unbounded clause
length it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of constraints to n+1,
yet no polynomial-time algorithm can reduce to an equivalent instance with
bits for any e > 0, unless NP is a subset of coNP/poly.Comment: Updated the cross-composition in lemma 18 (minor update), since the
previous version did NOT satisfy requirement 4 of lemma 18 (the proof of
Claim 20 was incorrect
Optimal Sparsification for Some Binary CSPs Using Low-Degree Polynomials
This paper analyzes to what extent it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of clauses in NP-hard satisfiability problems, without changing the answer. Upper and lower bounds are established using the concept of kernelization. Existing results show that if NP is not contained in coNP/poly, no efficient preprocessing algorithm can reduce n-variable instances of CNF-SAT with d literals per clause, to equivalent instances with O(n^{d-epsilon}) bits for any epsilon > 0. For the Not-All-Equal SAT problem, a compression to size tilde-O(n^{d-1}) exists. We put these results in a common framework by analyzing the compressibility of binary CSPs. We characterize constraint types based on the minimum degree of multivariate polynomials whose roots correspond to the satisfying assignments, obtaining (nearly) matching upper and lower bounds in several settings. Our lower bounds show that not just the number of constraints, but also the encoding size of individual constraints plays an important role. For example, for Exact Satisfiability with unbounded clause length it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of constraints to n+1, yet no polynomial-time algorithm can reduce to an equivalent instance with O(n^{2-epsilon}) bits for any epsilon > 0, unless NP is contained in coNP/poly
On the Hardness of Compressing Weights
We investigate computational problems involving large weights through the
lens of kernelization, which is a framework of polynomial-time preprocessing
aimed at compressing the instance size. Our main focus is the weighted Clique
problem, where we are given an edge-weighted graph and the goal is to detect a
clique of total weight equal to a prescribed value. We show that the weighted
variant, parameterized by the number of vertices , is significantly harder
than the unweighted problem by presenting an lower
bound on the size of the kernel, under the assumption that NP
coNP/poly. This lower bound is essentially tight: we show that we can reduce
the problem to the case with weights bounded by , which yields a
randomized kernel of bits.
We generalize these results to the weighted -Uniform Hyperclique problem,
Subset Sum, and weighted variants of Boolean Constraint Satisfaction Problems
(CSPs). We also study weighted minimization problems and show that weight
compression is easier when we only want to preserve the collection of optimal
solutions. Namely, we show that for node-weighted Vertex Cover on bipartite
graphs it is possible to maintain the set of optimal solutions using integer
weights from the range , but if we want to maintain the ordering of the
weights of all inclusion-minimal solutions, then weights as large as
are necessary.Comment: To appear at MFCS'2
Linear-Time FPT Algorithms via Network Flow
In the area of parameterized complexity, to cope with NP-Hard problems, we
introduce a parameter k besides the input size n, and we aim to design
algorithms (called FPT algorithms) that run in O(f(k)n^d) time for some
function f(k) and constant d. Though FPT algorithms have been successfully
designed for many problems, typically they are not sufficiently fast because of
huge f(k) and d. In this paper, we give FPT algorithms with small f(k) and d
for many important problems including Odd Cycle Transversal and Almost 2-SAT.
More specifically, we can choose f(k) as a single exponential (4^k) and d as
one, that is, linear in the input size. To the best of our knowledge, our
algorithms achieve linear time complexity for the first time for these
problems. To obtain our algorithms for these problems, we consider a large
class of integer programs, called BIP2. Then we show that, in linear time, we
can reduce BIP2 to Vertex Cover Above LP preserving the parameter k, and we can
compute an optimal LP solution for Vertex Cover Above LP using network flow.
Then, we perform an exhaustive search by fixing half-integral values in the
optimal LP solution for Vertex Cover Above LP. A bottleneck here is that we
need to recompute an LP optimal solution after branching. To address this
issue, we exploit network flow to update the optimal LP solution in linear
time.Comment: 20 page
Fast counting with tensor networks
We introduce tensor network contraction algorithms for counting satisfying
assignments of constraint satisfaction problems (#CSPs). We represent each
arbitrary #CSP formula as a tensor network, whose full contraction yields the
number of satisfying assignments of that formula, and use graph theoretical
methods to determine favorable orders of contraction. We employ our heuristics
for the solution of #P-hard counting boolean satisfiability (#SAT) problems,
namely monotone #1-in-3SAT and #Cubic-Vertex-Cover, and find that they
outperform state-of-the-art solvers by a significant margin.Comment: v2: added results for monotone #1-in-3SAT; published versio
Guarantees and Limits of Preprocessing in Constraint Satisfaction and Reasoning
We present a first theoretical analysis of the power of polynomial-time
preprocessing for important combinatorial problems from various areas in AI. We
consider problems from Constraint Satisfaction, Global Constraints,
Satisfiability, Nonmonotonic and Bayesian Reasoning under structural
restrictions. All these problems involve two tasks: (i) identifying the
structure in the input as required by the restriction, and (ii) using the
identified structure to solve the reasoning task efficiently. We show that for
most of the considered problems, task (i) admits a polynomial-time
preprocessing to a problem kernel whose size is polynomial in a structural
problem parameter of the input, in contrast to task (ii) which does not admit
such a reduction to a problem kernel of polynomial size, subject to a
complexity theoretic assumption. As a notable exception we show that the
consistency problem for the AtMost-NValue constraint admits a polynomial kernel
consisting of a quadratic number of variables and domain values. Our results
provide a firm worst-case guarantees and theoretical boundaries for the
performance of polynomial-time preprocessing algorithms for the considered
problems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1104.2541,
arXiv:1104.556
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