2 research outputs found
The Power of the Combined Basic LP and Affine Relaxation for Promise CSPs
In the field of constraint satisfaction problems (CSP), promise CSPs are an
exciting new direction of study. In a promise CSP, each constraint comes in two
forms: "strict" and "weak," and in the associated decision problem one must
distinguish between being able to satisfy all the strict constraints versus not
being able to satisfy all the weak constraints. The most commonly cited example
of a promise CSP is the approximate graph coloring problem--which has recently
seen exciting progress [BKO19, WZ20] benefiting from a systematic algebraic
approach to promise CSPs based on "polymorphisms," operations that map tuples
in the strict form of each constraint to tuples in the corresponding weak form.
In this work, we present a simple algorithm which in polynomial time solves
the decision problem for all promise CSPs that admit infinitely many symmetric
polymorphisms, which are invariant under arbitrary coordinate permutations.
This generalizes previous work of the first two authors [BG19]. We also extend
this algorithm to a more general class of block-symmetric polymorphisms. As a
corollary, this single algorithm solves all polynomial-time tractable Boolean
CSPs simultaneously. These results give a new perspective on Schaefer's classic
dichotomy theorem and shed further light on how symmetries of polymorphisms
enable algorithms. Finally, we show that block symmetric polymorphisms are not
only sufficient but also necessary for this algorithm to work, thus
establishing its precise powerComment: 17 pages, to appear in SICOM