Resource Bounded Immunity and Simplicity

Revisiting the thirty years-old notions of resource-bounded immunity and simplicity, we investigate the structural characteristics of various immunity notions: strong immunity, almost immunity, and hyperimmunity as well as their corresponding simplicity notions. We also study limited immunity and simplicity, called k-immunity and feasible k-immunity, and their simplicity notions. Finally, we propose the k-immune hypothesis as a working hypothesis that guarantees the existence of simple sets in NP.Comment: This is a complete version of the conference paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the 3rd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science, Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp.81-95, Toulouse, France, August 23-26, 200

Immunity and Simplicity for Exact Counting and Other Counting Classes

Ko [RAIRO 24, 1990] and Bruschi [TCS 102, 1992] showed that in some relativized world, PSPACE (in fact, ParityP) contains a set that is immune to the polynomial hierarchy (PH). In this paper, we study and settle the question of (relativized) separations with immunity for PH and the counting classes PP, C_{=}P, and ParityP in all possible pairwise combinations. Our main result is that there is an oracle A relative to which C_{=}P contains a set that is immune to BPP^{ParityP}. In particular, this C_{=}P^A set is immune to PH^{A} and ParityP^{A}. Strengthening results of Tor\'{a}n [J.ACM 38, 1991] and Green [IPL 37, 1991], we also show that, in suitable relativizations, NP contains a C_{=}P-immune set, and ParityP contains a PP^{PH}-immune set. This implies the existence of a C_{=}P^{B}-simple set for some oracle B, which extends results of Balc\'{a}zar et al. [SIAM J.Comp. 14, 1985; RAIRO 22, 1988] and provides the first example of a simple set in a class not known to be contained in PH. Our proof technique requires a circuit lower bound for ``exact counting'' that is derived from Razborov's [Mat. Zametki 41, 1987] lower bound for majority.Comment: 20 page

On the Impossibility of Probabilistic Proofs in Relativized Worlds

We initiate the systematic study of probabilistic proofs in relativized worlds, where the goal is to understand, for a given oracle, the possibility of "non-trivial" proof systems for deterministic or nondeterministic computations that make queries to the oracle. This question is intimately related to a recent line of work that seeks to improve the efficiency of probabilistic proofs for computations that use functionalities such as cryptographic hash functions and digital signatures, by instantiating them via constructions that are "friendly" to known constructions of probabilistic proofs. Informally, negative results about probabilistic proofs in relativized worlds provide evidence that this line of work is inherent and, conversely, positive results provide a way to bypass it. We prove several impossibility results for probabilistic proofs relative to natural oracles. Our results provide strong evidence that tailoring certain natural functionalities to known probabilistic proofs is inherent

Node Labels in Local Decision

The role of unique node identifiers in network computing is well understood as far as symmetry breaking is concerned. However, the unique identifiers also leak information about the computing environment - in particular, they provide some nodes with information related to the size of the network. It was recently proved that in the context of local decision, there are some decision problems such that (1) they cannot be solved without unique identifiers, and (2) unique node identifiers leak a sufficient amount of information such that the problem becomes solvable (PODC 2013). In this work we give study what is the minimal amount of information that we need to leak from the environment to the nodes in order to solve local decision problems. Our key results are related to scalar oracles $f$ that, for any given $n$, provide a multiset $f(n)$ of $n$ labels; then the adversary assigns the labels to the $n$ nodes in the network. This is a direct generalisation of the usual assumption of unique node identifiers. We give a complete characterisation of the weakest oracle that leaks at least as much information as the unique identifiers. Our main result is the following dichotomy: we classify scalar oracles as large and small, depending on their asymptotic behaviour, and show that (1) any large oracle is at least as powerful as the unique identifiers in the context of local decision problems, while (2) for any small oracle there are local decision problems that still benefit from unique identifiers.Comment: Conference version to appear in the proceedings of SIROCCO 201

Approximating the Spectrum of a Graph

The spectrum of a network or graph $G=(V,E)$ with adjacency matrix $A$, consists of the eigenvalues of the normalized Laplacian $L= I - D^{-1/2} A D^{-1/2}$. This set of eigenvalues encapsulates many aspects of the structure of the graph, including the extent to which the graph posses community structures at multiple scales. We study the problem of approximating the spectrum $\lambda = (\lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_{|V|})$, $0 \le \lambda_1,\le \dots, \le \lambda_{|V|}\le 2$ of $G$ in the regime where the graph is too large to explicitly calculate the spectrum. We present a sublinear time algorithm that, given the ability to query a random node in the graph and select a random neighbor of a given node, computes a succinct representation of an approximation $\widetilde \lambda = (\widetilde \lambda_1,\dots,\widetilde \lambda_{|V|})$, $0 \le \widetilde \lambda_1,\le \dots, \le \widetilde \lambda_{|V|}\le 2$ such that $\|\widetilde \lambda - \lambda\|_1 \le \epsilon |V|$. Our algorithm has query complexity and running time $exp(O(1/\epsilon))$, independent of the size of the graph, $|V|$. We demonstrate the practical viability of our algorithm on 15 different real-world graphs from the Stanford Large Network Dataset Collection, including social networks, academic collaboration graphs, and road networks. For the smallest of these graphs, we are able to validate the accuracy of our algorithm by explicitly calculating the true spectrum; for the larger graphs, such a calculation is computationally prohibitive. In addition we study the implications of our algorithm to property testing in the bounded degree graph model