Approximation Limits of Linear Programs (Beyond Hierarchies)

We develop a framework for approximation limits of polynomial-size linear programs from lower bounds on the nonnegative ranks of suitably defined matrices. This framework yields unconditional impossibility results that are applicable to any linear program as opposed to only programs generated by hierarchies. Using our framework, we prove that O(n^{1/2-eps})-approximations for CLIQUE require linear programs of size 2^{n^\Omega(eps)}. (This lower bound applies to linear programs using a certain encoding of CLIQUE as a linear optimization problem.) Moreover, we establish a similar result for approximations of semidefinite programs by linear programs. Our main ingredient is a quantitative improvement of Razborov's rectangle corruption lemma for the high error regime, which gives strong lower bounds on the nonnegative rank of certain perturbations of the unique disjointness matrix.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figure

Semidefinite Programming in Combinatorial and Polynomial Optimization

In the recent years semidefinite programming has become a widely used tool for designing better efficient algorithms for approximating hard combinatorial optimization problems and, more generally, polynomial optimization problems, which deal with optimizing a polynomial objective function over a basic closed semialgebraic set. The underlying paradigm is that, while testing nonnegativity of a polynomial is a hard problem, one can test efficiently whether it can be written as a sum of squares of polynomials, using semidefinite programming. In this note we sketch some of the main mathematical tools that underlie this approach and illustrate its application to some graph problems dealing with maximum cuts, stable sets and graph coloring

Lower Bounds for CSP Refutation by SDP Hierarchies

For a k-ary predicate P, a random instance of CSP(P) with n variables and m constraints is unsatisfiable with high probability when m >= O(n). The natural algorithmic task in this regime is refutation: finding a proof that a given random instance is unsatisfiable. Recent work of Allen et al. suggests that the difficulty of refuting CSP(P) using an SDP is determined by a parameter cmplx(P), the smallest t for which there does not exist a t-wise uniform distribution over satisfying assignments to P. In particular they show that random instances of CSP(P) with m >> n^{cmplx(P)/2} can be refuted efficiently using an SDP. In this work, we give evidence that n^{cmplx(P)/2} constraints are also necessary for refutation using SDPs. Specifically, we show that if P supports a (t-1)-wise uniform distribution over satisfying assignments, then the Sherali-Adams_+ and Lovasz-Schrijver_+ SDP hierarchies cannot refute a random instance of CSP(P) in polynomial time for any m <= n^{t/2-epsilon}

Proof Complexity Meets Algebra

We analyse how the standard reductions between constraint satisfaction problems affect their proof complexity. We show that, for the most studied propositional and semi-algebraic proof systems, the classical constructions of pp-interpretability, homomorphic equivalence and addition of constants to a core preserve the proof complexity of the CSP. As a result, for those proof systems, the classes of constraint languages for which small unsatisfiability certificates exist can be characterised algebraically. We illustrate our results by a gap theorem saying that a constraint language either has resolution refutations of bounded width, or does not have bounded-depth Frege refutations of subexponential size. The former holds exactly for the widely studied class of constraint languages of bounded width. This class is also known to coincide with the class of languages with Sums-of-Squares refutations of sublinear degree, a fact for which we provide an alternative proof. We hence ask for the existence of a natural proof system with good behaviour with respect to reductions and simultaneously small size refutations beyond bounded width. We give an example of such a proof system by showing that bounded-degree Lovasz-Schrijver satisfies both requirements